Celebrating Tetris with Arduino

Did you know that Tetris turned 30 today?

Image Credit: Wikipedia

Programmed by Alexey Pajitnov, the game was released on June 6, 1984 while he was working for the Dorodnicyn Computing Centre of the Academy of Science of the USSR in Moscow.

According to Wikipedia, the wildly popular Tetris derived its name from the Greek numerical prefix tetra (all of the game’s pieces contain four segments) and tennis, Pajitnov’s favorite sport.

Image Credit: Wikipedia

The game (or one of its many variants) is available for nearly every video game console and computer operating system, as well as on devices such as graphing calculators, mobile phones, portable media players and PDAs.

Recently, the folks at jolliFactory designed an Arduino-based, bi-color LED Matrix Tetris game, just in time for the title’s 30th birthday.

The game – which surfaced on Instructables earlier this week – is built around two of jolliFactory’s bi-color LED Matrix Driver Module, a platform that allows Makers to easily daisy-chain multiple components.

“Just for fun, we thought we could build a simple Tetris game by daisy-chaining two of the bi-color LED Matrix Driver modules together driven by an Arduino Nano (Atmel ATmega328 MCU) simply by adapting similar projects found at Instructables… We expanded our search to other online sites and managed to find some information which we adapted to build a simple Arduino based bi-color LED matrix Tetris game,” a jolliFactory rep explained.

“As this project is simply built for the FUN factor with no intention of using it for long, we did not pay too much attention to build a proper enclosure. However, the enclosure should enable the player to hand-held the gadget to play quite comfortably. What we have for the enclosure is a cardboard box backing with a blue tinted acrylic protective front with the game control push button switches mounted.”

Interested in learning more? You can check out the project’s official Instructables page here.