The web interface allows the various sound options to be easily configured.
The basic concept of the Tetris clock is that falling bricks stick together in the shape of numbers to display the time. In this case, the clock is based on the version created by [Brian Lough] which we featured previously. It relies on an RGB LED matrix as a display.
However, the build has had a few upgrades courtesy of [The Electronic Engineer]. With the help of an I2S audio breakout board, the clock can play sounds at various times of day. It’s currently set up with clips from various cartoons announcing lunch and coffee break times. There’s also a web interface added in for configuration purposes, and some text tickers too.
The idea of a tritium power cell is pretty straightforward: stick enough of the tiny glowing tubes to a photovoltaic panel and your DIY “nuclear battery” will generate energy for the next decade or so. Only problem is that the power produced, measured in a few microwatts, isn’t enough to do much with. But as [Ian Charnas] demonstrates in his latest video, you can eke some real-world use out of such a cell by storing up its power over a long enough period.
As with previous projects we’ve seen, [Ian] builds his cell by sandwiching an array of keychain-sized tritium tubes between two solar panels. Isolated from any outside light, power produced by the panels is the result of the weak green glow given off by the tube’s phosphorus coating as it gets bombarded with electrons. The panels are then used to charge a bank of thin-film solid state batteries, which are notable for their exceptionally low self-discharge rate.
Some quick math told [Ian] that a week of charging should build up enough of a charge to power a knock-off handheld Tetris game for about 10 minutes. Unfortunately, after waiting the prescribed amount of time, he got only a few seconds of runtime out of his hacked together power source.
His best guess is that he got a bad batch of thin-film batteries, but since he could no longer find the exact part number he used originally, he had to design a whole new PCB for the second attempt. After waiting two long months to switch the game on this time, he was able to play for nearly an hour before his homebrew nuclear energy source was depleted.
We wouldn’t consider this terribly practical from a gaming standpoint, but like the solar harvesting handheld game we covered last year, it’s an interesting demonstration of how even a minuscule amount of power can be put to work for intermittent applications. Here it’s a short bout of wonky Tetris, but the concept could just as easily be applied to an off-grid sensor.
As explained in the video below, the adapter is essentially just a Raspberry Pi Pico paired with some level shifters so that it can talk to the Game Boy’s link port. That said, the custom PCB does implement some very clever edge connectors that let you plug it right into the Link Cable for the original “brick” Game Boy as well as the later Color and Advance variants. This keeps you from having to cut up a Link Cable just to get a male end, which is what [stacksmashing] had to do during the prototyping phase.
The DIY breadboard approach works as well.
Of course, the hardware is only one half of the equation. There’s also an open source software stack which includes a Python server and WebUSB frontend that handles communicating with the Game Boy and connecting players. While the original game only supported a two person head-to-head mode, the relatively simplistic nature of the multiplayer gameplay allowed [stacksmashing] to expand that to an arbitrary number of players with his code. The core rules haven’t changed, and each client Game Boy still thinks it’s in a two player match, but the web interface will show the progress of other players and who ends up on top at the end.
To be clear, this isn’t some transparent Link Cable to TCP/IP solution. While something like that could potentially be possible with the hardware, as of right now, the software [stacksmashing] has put together only works for Tetris. So if you want to battle Pokemon over the net, you’ll have to do your own reverse engineering (or at least wait for somebody else to inevitably do it).
It hardly seems possible, but engineer collective and split-flap display purveyors [Oat Foundry] were able to build a working implementation of Tetris on a 10 x 40 split-flap display in the span of a single day. Check it out in the video after the break.
This project is a bit understaffed in the details department, but we do know that [Oat Foundry] started with [Timur Bakibayev]’s open-source implementation of Tetris in Python and modified the draw function to work on a split-flap display. As you may have guessed, the biggest obstacle is the refresh rate and how it affects playability — particularly during those tense moments when a player rotates a piece before dropping it. Split-flaps flip quickly from on to off, but flipping back to on requires a full trip around through all the other characters.
We think this is nice work for a one-day build. Should they go further, we’d like to see the same things implemented as [Oat Foundry] does: a high score tracker and a preview of the next piece.
Don’t have a split-flap display? Yeah, us either, but we do have televisions. Turn on the tube and check out this Nano-scale Tetris.
[Michael Pick] calls himself the casual engineer, though we don’t know whether he is referring to his work clothes or his laid back attitude. However, he does like to show quick and easy projects. His latest? A little portable Tetris game for $9 worth of parts. There is an Arduino Pro Mini and a tiny display along with a few switches and things on a prototyping PC board. [Michael] claims it is a one day build, and we imagine it wouldn’t even be that much.
Our only complaint is that there isn’t a clear bill of material or the code. However, we think you could figure out the parts pretty easy and there are bound to be plenty of games including Tetris that you could adapt to the hardware.
Tetris may have first arrived in the West on machines such as the PC and Amiga, but its genesis at the hands of [Alexey Pajitnov] was on an Electronika 60, a Soviet clone of an early-1970s DEC PDP-11. Thus those tumbling blocks are hardly demanding in terms of processor power, and a game can be implemented on the humblest of hardware. Relatively modern silicon such as the Atmega328 in [c0pperdragon]’s Arduino Nano Tetris console should then have no problems, but to make that assumption is to miss the quality of the achievement.
In a typical home or desktop computer of the 1980s the processor would have been assisted by plenty of dedicated hardware, but since the Arduino has none of that the feat of creating the game with a 288p video signal having four gray scales and with four-channel music is an extremely impressive one. Beside the Nano there are only a few passive components, there are no CRT controllers or sound chips to be seen.
The entire device is packaged within a clone of a NES controller, with the passives on a piece of stripboard beside the Nano. There is a rudimentary resistor DAC to produce the grey scales, and the audio is not the direct PWM you might expect but a very simple DAC created by charging and discharging a capacitor at the video line frequency. The results can be seen and heard in the video below the break, and though we’re sure we’ve heard something like that tune before, it looks to be a very playable little game.
[Robson Couto] started to get interested in musical projects and as a side effect created downloadable code with simple notation for a good variety of themes, songs, and melodies. They are all for the Arduino and use only the built-in tone() function, but don’t let that distract you. If you look past that, you’ll see that each sketch is a melody that consists of single notes and durations; easily adapted to other purposes or simply used as-is. After all, [Robson] wanted the source of each tune to be easily understood, easily modified, and to have no external dependencies.
All that may sound a bit like MIDI, but MIDI has much more in common with hardware events than music notation because it includes (among other things) note starts and note ends as separate elements. Converting MIDI into a more usable format was a big part of a project that fed Bach music to a neural network and got surprisingly good results.
When doing music projects, sometimes having a recognizable melody represented very simply as notes and durations with only one note at a time can be an awfully handy resource, and you can find them on GitHub. There’s a brief video of the Tetris theme (actual name: Korobeiniki) being played after the break.
