Adafruit has released yet another awesome rainy day project for you, your 3D printer, and your low-cost microcontrollers. It’s glowy, like their 3D printed Daft Punk helmet, but it’s smaller and more interactive. It’s Tiny Tetris!
Adafruit’s Jinan Li takes you by the hand and guides you through hacking together an LED gaming device that can play Tetris and Snake, and paint crude pictures. The project requires an Adafruit Pro Trinket, a a battery charger, a an LED matrix, a battery, a joystick, an on/off switch, three buttons, and some wiring, resistors, screws, and magnets.
As you might expect from these sorts of projects, you more or less solder the buttons, joystick, and LED screen to the resistors and wires and then solder those to the microcontroller. It’s easier said than done, but it doesn’t look too difficult for the experienced Maker.
This is all glued to a 3D printed case, which you can customize with a 3D modeling program if you like. The case is closed with the magnets mentioned above. Then, you upload the program for Tetris, Snake, and Paint to the Trinket and you’re ready to get playing! I personally get a kick out of the selection screen depicting each of the games on this tiny computer.
For the complete tutorial, head over to the Adafruit Learning System.
