A Lunar Lander-meets-Flappy-Bird game where you must rescue puppies from a Moon base, on an OLED display.

2024 Tiny Games Contest: Save The Stranded Puppies Of Moon Base P!

August 19, 2024 by 4 Comments

Usually, if something is tiny, it’s probably pretty cute to boot. [Luke J. Barker]’s lunar navigation game is no exception to this unwritten rule. And as far as contest rules go, this one seems to fit rather nicely, as it is tiny on more than one level.

Moon Base P (for Puppies) is built upon a XIAO ESP32-C3, an SSD1306 OLED display, and a single button to keep the BOM tidy. In this riveting side-scroller which sort of marries Lunar Lander and Flappy Bird, the top bar is always yellow and displays fuel and such, and the bottom is a rough, blue lunar surface over which you must maneuver your lunar lander. Keep pressing the button to stay up and avoid mountains, or let off the gas to cool the engine.

Fly that thing over the terrain, avoiding stray meteors and picking up free fuel, and then land gently at Moon Base P to save the stranded puppies. But you must keep flying — touch down anywhere but where you’re supposed to, and it’s game over! Once you’ve picked up the puppies, you must fly them safely onward to the rescue pod in order to win. Don’t miss the walk-through and demo after the break.

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Hackaday Links: August 18, 2024

August 18, 2024 by 4 Comments

They’re back! The San Francisco autonomous vehicle hijinks, that is, as Waymo’s fleet of driverless cars recently took up the fun new hobby of honking their horns in the wee hours of the morning. Meat-based neighbors of a Waymo parking lot in the South Market neighborhood took offense at the fleet of autonomous vehicles sounding off at 4:00 AM as they shuffled themselves around in the parking lot in a slow-motion ballet of undetermined purpose. The horn-honking is apparently by design, as the cars are programmed to tootle their horn trumpets melodiously if they detect another vehicle backing up into them. That’s understandable; we’ve tootled ourselves under these conditions, with vigor, even. But when the parking lot is full of cars that (presumably) can’t hear the honking and (also presumably) know where the other driverless vehicles are as well as their intent, what’s the point? Luckily, Waymo is on the case, as they issued a fix to keep the peace. Unfortunately, it sounds like the fix is just to geofence the lot and inhibit honking there, which seems like just a band-aid to us.

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Zero-dimensional PONG game built on a perfboard.

2024 Tiny Games Contest: Coming At Ya With Zero-Dimensional PONG

August 18, 2024 by 5 Comments

A decade is a long time to carry around a project idea in your head. Fortunately, the Tiny Games Contest happens to coincide with [Senile Data Systems]’s getting back into ATMega programming, so they can finally make their zero-dimensional PONG dreams come true (and have the chance at great prizes, too, of course).

If you don’t already get what’s going on here, zero-dimensional PONG takes 1D PONG and turns it on the short side. Imagine the light coming toward you, then moving away toward your opponent, and you have the basic idea. So, how is this done? Pulse-width modulation controls the brightness of the LED, and, well, you have to be pretty fast, although there is a small margin for the inevitable error.

In the video after the break, you can watch [SDS] play themselves using a red/green LED. Player one must press the button when red is fully lit and green is off, and player two goes when green is fully lit and red is off. The cool thing is that this game uses sockets, so it can use any LED. There are nine difficulty levels to control the PWM speed,  so one can really test one’s reaction time.

If you want to build one of these, you’ll need an ATtiny2313 or something similar, a couple of buttons, a display, and the optional but fun buzzer. The well-commented code is available through [Senile Data Systems]’s site.

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40,000 FPS Omega camera captures Olympic photo-finish

Olympic Sprint Decided By 40,000 FPS Photo Finish

August 17, 2024 by 55 Comments

Advanced technology played a crucial role in determining the winner of the men’s 100-meter final at the Paris 2024 Olympics. In a historically close race, American sprinter Noah Lyles narrowly edged out Jamaica’s Kishane Thompson by just five-thousandths of a second. The final decision relied on an image captured by an Omega photo finish camera that shoots an astonishing 40,000 frames per second.

This cutting-edge technology, originally reported by PetaPixel, ensured the accuracy of the result in a race where both athletes recorded a time of 9.78 seconds. If SmartThings’ shot pourer from the 2012 Olympics were still around, it could once again fulfill its intended role of celebrating US medals.

Omega, the Olympics’ official timekeeper for decades, has continually innovated to enhance performance measurement. The Omega Scan ‘O’ Vision Ultimate, the camera used for this photo finish, is a significant upgrade from its 10,000 frames per second predecessor. The new system captures four times as many frames per second and offers higher resolution, providing a detailed view of the moment each runner’s torso touches the finish line. This level of detail was crucial in determining that Lyles’ torso touched the line first, securing his gold medal.

This camera is part of Omega’s broader technological advancements for the Paris 2024 Olympics, which include advanced Computer Vision systems utilizing AI and high-definition cameras to track athletes in real-time. For a closer look at how technology decided this historic race, watch the video by Eurosport that captured the event.

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A small physical version of the game 2048, played with LEDs as numbers and tilt for input.

2024 Tiny Games Challenge: It’s 2048, But With LEDs

August 17, 2024 by 8 Comments

Remember the game 2048? You slide numbered tiles around on a grid, combining them until you have one tile with a value of 2048 (although it’s possible to go higher). Legend has it that 2048 was created by a bored teenager in the space of a weekend to see if he could program a game from scratch.

It only took a couple of weekends for [David] to get Tiny2048 up and running. In this version, each RGB value represents a number value, and input comes from a rudimentary gesture detector — tilt it this way and that to move the LEDs and combine the ‘numbers’. As you might imagine, it was a bit tricky to use colors to represent numbers, so each one had to be sufficiently unique.

[David] says that the LED matrix is a string of WS2812 LEDs in a grid formation, controlled by an ESP32-S3-MINI-1. Although this may be overkill, [David] broke out a bunch of IO at the top of the board so it can be used in the future as a dev board. Be sure to check it out in blinkenlight action after the break!

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Three different views of a tiny games console with a screen and a single button. It's assembled in the first picture, and the guts are shown in the second two pictures.

2024 Tiny Games Contest: Salsa One Handheld Requires No PCB

August 16, 2024 by 10 Comments

If you’re thinking about building a single tiny game or even a platform, you might be tempted to use a single button for everything. Such is the case with [Alex]’s Salsa ONE minimalist game console, which is inspired by both the Arduboy and the ergonomics of the SanDisk Sansa music player.

With Salsa ONE, [Alex] aimed to make something that is both simple and challenging. The result is something that, awesomely enough, doesn’t need a PCB, and can be comfortably controlled with just one thumb. There isn’t much to this thing, which is essentially an RP2040, an OLED, a vibration motor, a buzzer, a button, and a CR2032 coin cell. [Alex] chose to program Salsa ONE in MicroPython. Be sure to check it out in action in the brief demo after the break.

Have you got an idea for a tiny game? Don’t hesitate to enter the 2024 Tiny Games Contest! You have until September 10th, so head on over to Hackaday.io and get started today.

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Hackaday Podcast Episode 284: Laser Fault Injection, Console Hacks, And Too Much Audio

August 16, 2024 by 1 Comment

The summer doldrums are here, but that doesn’t mean that Elliot and Dan couldn’t sift through the week’s hack and find the real gems. It was an audio-rich week, with a nifty microsynth, music bounced off the moon, and everything you always wanted to know about Raspberry Pi audio but were afraid to ask. We looked into the mysteries of waveguides and found a math-free way to understand how they work, and looked at the way Mecanum wheels work in the most soothing way possible. We also each locked in on more classic hacks, Elliot with a look at a buffer overflow in Tony Hawks Pro Skater and Dan with fault injection user a low-(ish) cost laser setup. From Proxxon upgrades to an RC submarine to Arya’s portable router build, we’ve got plenty of material for your late summer listening pleasure.

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