Meet The Winners Of The 2024 Tiny Games Contest

September 18, 2024 by Tom Nardi 12 Comments

Over the years, we’ve figured out some pretty sure-fire ways to get hackers and makers motivated for contests. One of the best ways is to put arbitrary limits on different aspects of the project, such as how large it can be or how much power it can consume. Don’t believe us? Then just take a look at the entries of this year’s Tiny Games Contest.

Nearly 80 projects made it across the finish line this time, and our panel of judges have spent the last week or so going over each one to try and narrow it down to a handful of winners. We’ll start things off with the top three projects, each of which will be awarded a $150 gift certificate from our friends at DigiKey.

First: Sub-Surface Simon

While this contest saw a lot of excellent entries, we don’t think anyone is going to be surprised to see this one take the top spot. Earning an exceptionally rare perfect ten score from each of our judges, Sub-Surface Simon from [alnwlsn] grabbed onto the theme of this contest and ran like hell with it. Continue reading “Meet The Winners Of The 2024 Tiny Games Contest” →

2024 Tiny Games Contest: Neat PCB Business Card Was Inspired By The Arduboy

September 13, 2024 by Lewin Day No comments

The humble business card is usually a small slip of cardboard with some basic contact details on it — but as hackers know, it can be so much more. [Marian] has provided us a great example in the form of his own digital business card, which doubles as a handheld game!

Wanting to make his business card more interesting for better engagement, [Marian] was inspired by the Arduboy to give it some interactivity. He chose the STM32G030F6 microcontroller as a cheap and reliable option to run his business card. He then created a 10×9 LED matrix display using Charlieplexing to minimize the amount of I/O pins required. For controls, he went with the usual directional cross plus two action buttons. He implemented a variety of games on the card—including a Flappy Bird clone and a game similar to the classic Simon toy.

Files are on GitHub for the curious. We’ve featured some other great business cards this year, too. Indeed, we ran a whole challenge! If you’re cooking up your own exemplary little PCB to hand out at conferences, don’t hesitate to let us know!

A Simon game built into an ATtiny84 in a DIP-14 package.

2024 Tiny Games Contest: Spectacular Sub-Surface Simon

September 12, 2024 by Kristina Panos 16 Comments

When you work with tiny things on the regular, they start to seem normal-sized to your hands and eyes. Then, if you work with even smaller packages, stuff like 0603 might as well be through-hole components.

[alnwlsn] is no stranger to the small, having worked almost exclusively with surface mount components for a few years now. Even so, they’ve built up an admirable stock of DIP chips, including the ATtiny84 DIP-14 that their incredible Simon game is built into.

How in the world did [alnwlsn] accomplish this? As you’ll see in the video after the break, the answer lies in milling, but with the motors disconnected and manually turning the knobs.

Soldering didn’t require anything special, just the usual suspects like a fine-tipped iron, an X-acto knife, some tweezers, and a few other things like a hot air gun for soldering fine wires to the leadframe. Oh, and of course, really steady hands, and lots of patience.

The 2024 Tiny Games Contest officially closed on Tuesday, September 10th. We’ll have the results out as soon as possible. Best of luck to all who entered!

Continue reading “2024 Tiny Games Contest: Spectacular Sub-Surface Simon” →

2024 Tiny Games Contest: A Flappy Seagull Game With Sound In Only 500 Bytes

September 12, 2024 by Dan Maloney 4 Comments

It was probably a reasonable assumption that the “Tiny” in our recently concluded Tiny Games Contest mostly referred to the physical footprint of the game. And indeed, that’s the way most of the entries broke, which resulted in some pretty amazing efforts. [Anders Nielsen], however, took the challenge another way and managed to stuff a seagull-centric side-scroller into just 500 bytes of code.

That’s not to say that the size of [Anders]’s game is physically huge either. Flappy Larus, as he calls his game, runs on his popular 65uino platform, a 6502 microcontroller in the familiar Arduino Uno form factor. So it’s pretty small to begin with, and doesn’t even need any additional components other than the tiny OLED screen which has become more or less standard for the 65uino at this point. The only real add-on is a piezo speaker module, which when hooked up to the I2C data line happens to make reasonable approximations of a squawking seagull, all without adding a single byte of code. Check out a little game play in the video below.

Flappy Larus may be pretty simplistic, but as we recall, the game it’s based on was similarly minimalist and still managed to get people hooked. The 2024 Tiny Games contest is closed now, but if you’ve got an idea for a tiny game, we’d still love to feature it. Hit the tip line and we’ll take a look! Continue reading “2024 Tiny Games Contest: A Flappy Seagull Game With Sound In Only 500 Bytes” →

A tiny colorful slot machine that uses LEDs instead of fruits or numbers.

2024 Tiny Games Contest: Micro One-Armed Bandit Hits The Cuteness Jackpot

September 11, 2024 by Kristina Panos 3 Comments

They don’t call slot machines one-armed bandits for nothing. And although it’s getting harder and harder to find slot machines with actual pull-able handles instead of just big buttons, you can easily simulate the handle at home with the right kind of limit switch, as [Andrew Smith] did with this micro slot machine.

This baby slot machine is built around the Adafruit 5×5 NeoPixel grid, which is an add-on for the QT Py. As you’ll see in the brief demo video after the break, the switch actuates on release, which starts the lights a-spinning. [Andrew] says the constraints of the SAMD21-powered QT Py made this a particularly fun challenge.

Whereas most physical slot machines have different reel sequences, this build uses just one. [Andrew] declared hex values to ID each color, and then created the reel manually with different color frequencies. When the lever is released, the columns are animated and slowly to come to rest at a random offset. You can check out the code on GitHub.

Continue reading “2024 Tiny Games Contest: Micro One-Armed Bandit Hits The Cuteness Jackpot” →

An incredibly small gaming console with cartridges, each bearing an ATtiny10.

2024 Tiny Games Contest: An Epic Minimalist Entertainment System, Indeed

September 8, 2024 by Kristina Panos 2 Comments

One way to keep things tiny is to make a system with cartridges where the brain lives on each cartridge instead of the platform itself. [Michael]’s Epic Minimalist Entertainment System (EMES) is one of those, and boy, is it tiny. EMES makes use of the ATtiny10, and they don’t get much AT-tinier than that.

This nearly microscopic console uses an equally Lilliputian display — a Plessey GPD340 vintage LED display, in fact. (Check out [Michael]’s reverse engineering project if you want to play around with these.) There are four ultra-small buttons for control and a buzzer for sound.

Now, the ATtiny10 is an 8Mhz microcontroller with 1KB of flash and 32 bytes of RAM. It has an 8-bit ADC and a somewhat surprisingly high four GPIO pins. But of course, that’s not enough. Not with the display, the four buttons, and the buzzer, so [Michael] had to come up with a way to multiplex everything to four GPIOs.

PB0 is shared between the buttons and the display’s serial data input. PB1 cleverly outputs the same PWM for both the brightness control and the buzzer. When the buzzer is needed, [Michael]’s code switches to a lower frequency and adjusts the duty cycle of the display to keep it readable. PB2 and 3 are serial clock inputs for the two display halves. Be sure to check it out the heated PONG action in the video after the break!

There’s still a little bit of time to enter the 2024 Tiny Games Contest! You have until Tuesday, September 10th, so head on over to Hackaday.IO and get started!

Continue reading “2024 Tiny Games Contest: An Epic Minimalist Entertainment System, Indeed” →

A small handheld word game called Batch Craze, where one player tries to get another to guess the word on the screen.

2024 Tiny Games Contest: Batch Craze Is Portable Charades, Kind Of

September 3, 2024 by Kristina Panos No comments

So there’s this commercial electronic game out there called Catch Phrase, which, as the game’s own catch phrase explains, is the game that’s played one word at a time. See, a word comes up on the screen, and you have to get the other person or team to guess what it is using gestures and such before the timer goes off. There are a bunch of rules, like you can’t say a word that rhymes, give the first letter, or the number of syllables.

Well, [ahixson1230] and company got their hands on the After Dark NSFW version but found it lacking in the edginess department. So naturally, [ahixson1230] was inspired to build a better one, with a touch screen in lieu of buttons, and a way for players to suggest words to be added to the list. In this version, a player presses anywhere on the screen to start the game, and a random word or phrase comes up. They act it out, get the other person to guess, and then pass the unit over to continue the fun.

Batch Craze is based on the Cheap Yellow Display, aka the ESP32-2432S028R, and [ahixson1230] highly recommends [witnessmenow]’s excellent resource on the subject. As of this writing, [ahixson1230] is still trying to get the speaker to work, and welcomes any help. Can you assist?

There’s still time to enter the 2024 Tiny Games Contest! You have until Tuesday, September 10th, so head on over to Hackaday.IO and get started!