LED Tetris Table

December 18, 2016 by Jenny List 7 Comments

No hackspace is complete without an arcade game project or two. Usually these projects are time-worn generic cabinets scarred by the frustrated kicks of a million teenagers, the decades-old Japanese CRT monitors inside of which are ready to shuffle off this mortal coil. You are lucky if you catch them on a rare moment of functioning, and their owners are always hovering ready to attend to any soon-to-expire electronics.

York Hackspace have done things a little differently though. Their member [John] has an arcade game project, but instead of an aged cabinet he’s produced his own tabletop game with an array of multicolour addressable LED strips powered by a Raspberry Pi. Each LED sits in its own foam cell under the translucent surface, so it forms a low resolution color block display.

It’s a Tetris game in its first incarnation, but there is also a copy of Snake underway for it. If it catches your attention you can write your own games, because all its resources are available in a GitHub repository.

This is one of many Tetris interfaces we’ve seen over the years. Largest was probably this skyscraper, but this oscilloscope version is particularly well-executed. One of our most recent forays into Tetris-land though is also one of the most technically interesting, a 446-byte implementation in a master boot record.

Tetris In 446 Bytes

October 6, 2016 by Elliot Williams 48 Comments

You want to play Tetris. You want to play Tetris on any operating system. You want to play on an old IBM PC, you want to play Tetris on a new MacBook. You want a Tetris that’ll fit inside the master boot record of a disk. You want Tetris as an operating system. You want TetrOS.

Or maybe you don’t, but it’s a fantastic piece of work, and we love tiny demos. Check it out below the break. Or read through the source code in the banner image.

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42,300 Transistor Megaprocessor Is Complete

July 6, 2016 by Moritz Walter 83 Comments

As it turns out, the answer is not 42, it’s 42.3 — thousand. That’s how many discrete transistors spread across the 30 m² room housing this massive computation machine. [James Newman’s] Megaprocessor, a seriously enlarged version of a microprocessor, is a project we’ve been following with awe as it took shape over the last couple of years.

[James] documented his work in great detail, and by doing so, took us on a journey through the inner workings of microprocessors. His monumental machine is now finished, and it’s the ultimate answer to how a processor – and pretty much everything that contains a processor – works.

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Hand Gestures Play Tetris

May 28, 2016 by Bryan Cockfield 3 Comments

There are reports of a Tetris movie with a sizable budget, and with it come a plentiful amount of questions about how that would work. Who would the characters be? What kind of lines would there be to clear? Whatever the answers, we can all still play the classic game in the meantime. And, thanks to some of the engineering students at Cornell, we could play it without using a controller.

This hack comes from [Bruce Land]’s FPGA design course. The group’s game uses a video camera which outputs a standard NTSC signal and also does some filtering to detect the user. From there, the user can move their hands to different regions of the screen, which controls the movement of the Tetris pieces. This information is sent across GPIO to another FPGA which uses that to then play the game.

This game is done entirely in hardware, making it rather unique. All game dynamics including block generation, movement, and boundary conditions are set in hardware and all of the skin recognition is done in hardware as well. Be sure to check out the video of the students playing the game, and if you’re really into hand gesture-driven fun, you aren’t just limited to Tetris, you can also drive a car.

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Tetris Everywhere: Character LCD Edition

April 9, 2016 by Elliot Williams 19 Comments

Cheap character LCD displays are more versatile than we give them credit for. Most of the cheapies have a 5×8 character display, which looks blocky but legible when you have an appropriate font. Where it gets fun is that most of the LCD displays also let you upload custom characters.

Taking this to the extreme, [numeric] abused the user-defined characters to write a tiny game of Tetris that would run in the 10×16 frame that you get when you combine four characters together. It’s tiny, it’s monochrome, and doesn’t play the Troika theme (which may be a good thing), but it’s playable. Check out the video below.

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RGB LED Ceiling Display

December 20, 2015 by Anool Mahidharia 8 Comments

Disco Floor’s are passé. [dennis1a4] turned them upside down and built an awesome RGB LED ceiling display using some simple hardware and a lot of elbow grease. His main room ceiling was exactly 32 ft x 20 ft and using 2 sq. ft tiles, he figured he could make a nice grid using 160 WS2812B RGB LEDs. A Teensy mounted in the ceiling does all the heavy lifting, with two serial Bluetooth modules connected to it. These get connected to two Bluetooth enabled NES game controllers. Each of the NES controller is stuffed with an Arduino Pro Mini, a Bluetooth module, Li-Ion battery and a USB charge controller.

Bluetooth is in non-secure mode, allowing him to connect to the Teensy, and control the LEDs, from other devices besides the NES controllers. The Teensy is mounted at the centre of the ceiling to ensure a good Bluetooth link. Programming required a lot of thought and time but he did manage to include animations as well as popular games such as Snake and Tetris.

The hard part was wiring up all of the 160 LED pixels. Instead of mounting the 5050 SMD LED’s on PCBs, [dennis1a4] wired them all up “dead bug” style. Each pixel has one LED, a 100nF decoupling capacitor, and 91 ohm resistors in series with the Data In and Data Out pins – these apparently help prevent ‘ringing’ on the data bus. Check the video for his radical soldering method. Each SMD LED was clamped in a machine shop vice, and the other three parts with their leads preformed were soldered directly to the LED pins.

The other tedious task was planning and laying out the wiring harness. Sets of 10 LEDs were first wired up on the shop bench. He then tacked them up to the ceiling and soldered them to the 14 gauge main harness. The final part was to put up the suspended ceiling and close the 2 sq. ft. grids with opaque plastic.

[dennis1a4] did some trials to figure out the right distance between each LED and the panel to make sure they were illuminated fully without a lot of light bleeding in to adjacent panels. This allowed him to get away without using baffles between the tiles.

Check out the video to see a cool time-lapse of the whole build.

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Mimimalist Arduino Gaming Platform

May 27, 2015 by Elliot Williams 20 Comments

A pretty color LCD screen, an Arduino, a buzzer and a joystick is all you need for a minimalist gaming console for under $20. At least, that’s all [João Vilaça] needed to get this sweet version of Tetris up and running. ~~He’s working on Breakout right now.~~ His Breakout looks even better. See the postscript below for details.

It’s a testament to the current state of the hardware hacking scene that [João] could put this device together in an afternoon for so cheap, presumably after waiting a while for shipments from China. The 320×240 SPI color TFT LCD screen used to cost twice as much as this whole project did. And wiring it up is a simple matter of connecting this pin to that pin. Almost child’s play.

Equally impressive is the state of open source software. A TFT library from Seeed Studios makes the screen interface a piece of cake. [João] wrote his own sound and joystick code, and of course the Tetris gameplay itself, but it’d be much more than a few weeks’ work without standing on the shoulders of giants. Check out [João]’s Github for the project code and stick with us after the break for a demo video and some of our other favorite Arduino gaming hacks.

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