Minimal Tic Tac Toe Business Card

September 24, 2022 by Stephen Ogier 38 Comments

The PCB business card has long been a way for the aspiring electronics engineer to set themself apart from their peers. Handing out a card that is also a two player game is a great way to secure a couple minutes of a recruiter’s time, so [Ryan Chan] designed a business card that, in addition to his contact information, also has a complete Tic-Tac-Toe game built in.

[Ryan] decided that an OLED display was too expensive for something to hand out and an LED matrix too thick, so he decided to keep it simple and use an array of 18 LEDs—9 in each of two colors laid out in a familiar 3×3 grid. An ATmega328p running the Arduino bootloader serves as the brains of the operation. To achieve a truly minimal design [Ryan] uses a single SMD pushbutton for control: a short press moves your selection, a longer press finalizes your move, and a several-second press switches the game to a single-player mode, complete with AI.

If you’d like to design a Tic-Tac-Toe business card for yourself, [Ryan] was kind enough to upload the schematics and code for his card. If you’re still pondering what kind of PCB business card best represents you, it’s worth checking out cards with an updatable ePaper display or a tiny Tetris game.

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Friday Hack Chat: Hardware Games

October 4, 2017 by Brian Benchoff No comments

For this week’s Hack Chat, we’re talking all about hardware games. What’s a hardware game? Anything where we use hardware, electronics, or code for user interaction. This is a vast, vast topic and there are a lot of tips and tricks that go into making a unified experience that’s both valuable and can stand up to the rigors of any crowd.

Our guest for this week’s Hack Chat will be [Phoenix Perry], lecturer, CS PhD researcher, game company owner, artist, programmer, game designer, and activist. For every human-computer computer interaction to teaching computer science, [Phoenix] has had her hand in it. She founded Code Liberation Foundation, which teaches women to program games for free. She’s a lecturer in Physical Computing at Goldsmiths, University of London, she’s given talks at Hackaday conferences, she’s created low-poly trees,

For this Hack Chat, we’re going to be talking about integrating hardware into gaming, or turning the idea for a game into a reality with hardware. We’ll be discussing game design, hardware design for games (need to make it idiot-proof, after all), building communities, and educating others.

As usual with Hack Chats, we’re taking questions from the audience. If you have a question that simply must be answered, here’s a discussion sheet. Fill that out, and we might get around to your question

Our Hack Chats are live community events on the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This Hack Chat will be going down noon, Pacific time on Friday, October 6th. Wondering why the Brits were the first to settle on a single time zone when the US had a more extensive rail network and the longitude so time zones made sense? Here’s a time zone converter! Use that to ponder the mysteries of the universe.