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

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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2048: Embedded Edition

Embedded touch version of 2048 tile gameHow ’bout that 2048 game? Pretty addictive, huh? Almost as addictive as embedded systems are, at least if you’re [Andrew]. Armed (pun intended) with a Nucleo F4 and a Gameduino 2 shield, he decided to have a go at making an embedded version of the popular tile pusher web game.

If you’re unfamiliar with the Nucleo boards from STMicroelectronics, check out our post on the Nucleo family from a couple of months ago. The Gameduino 2 shield ships with a 4.3″ touchscreen driven by an FT800 GPU EVE. [Andrew] wrote his own driver for it and his blog post goes into great detail about its programming model and the SPI read, write, and command functions he wrote. Full code is available from [Andrew]’s repo.

He started by generating a blank screen based on clues found in the Gameduino 2 source. Pretty soon he had rendered a rectangle and then a full 2048 board. A minor difference between [Andrew]’s creation and the original is that his always creates new tiles as ‘2’ while the web game cranks out the occasional ‘4’.

We were unable to embed [Andrew]’s gameplay videos, but you’ll find two on his blog.