The LED Tetris Tie [Video]

[GAS] reader Bill P sent me this really cool LED Tetris tie he recently built as a 4-hour project. For now, the Tetris blocks going down on the tie are moving randomly, but Bill soon plans to add a basic AI that will attempt to solve the puzzle.

The tie is made out of 80 WS2811 based RGB LED pixels and is driven by a DigiSpark microcontroller. I pulled in this library written in assembly to drive the display and modified this Tetris engine heavily to suit my needs. With limited RAM I had to strip out unneeded features and optimize the Tetris code to make it work, I also converted it to support color values as it was originally monochrome only.

Structurally it’s just two pieces of card stock with fun bits sandwiched between and taped to a cheap clip-on. I plan to revisit the design and embed the strips directly into a fabric tie for long term use. Remember, I only did this in a single night. The kids loved it and the mission was accomplished.

[Bill P]