LED Tetris

Inspiration

Tetris was one of my favorite games growing up and is one of the few games that I still play from my childhood. Nhat and I partnered up at Technica to realize my lifelong dream of creating a playable hardware version of Tetris.

How We built it

We built it using an Arduino101, a strip of LED lights, and some cardboard we found lying around.

Challenges We ran into

Neither Nhat or I had experience working with an Arduino or C, so we had to tackle learning both the hardware side of wiring the Arduino to the LED lights and working with C. The pure time constraint of 24 hours made it difficult, as we spent the first 6 hours trying to get materials to build the board, and the next 4 hours soldering and building the board. I honestly can't remember how long it took us to realize that the Arduino wasn't working because of the laptop we were using and not because of the Arduino itself, but this ended up giving us very little time to develop and test the game code.

What We learned

I can confidently say that I can solder some really beautiful connections between wires and solder pads on a LED strip. Nhat did some awesome calculations that made it super easy for us to treat the Tetris board we had created as a standard matrix of lights. Not to mention, we got a great taste of Arduino C programming, and I had lots of soldering practice to say the least.

What's next for Tetris Hardware Hack

We spend a lot of time troubleshooting the hardware side, starting with incompatible LED lights with no power adapter, to buying a 40-pack of AA batteries in hope of creating our compatible power bank, to cutting and soldering roughly 60 connections, and finally realizing that the only laptop we had with a USB port for the Arduino was unable to recognize the device. We were able to implement the soft drop and randomization of Tetris pieces, but our next steps include implementing the functionality of the game, including collision detection and fancier moves like T-spinning.

Built With

• arduino
• led-strip