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Wednesday, November 23, 2011

LED Tetris with an Arduino Chip!

I am excited to share this video with you and explain a little bit of what is going on in this program/project.
*This is not my work*

The tetris grid is made of 16x16 LEDs or 256 LEDs! If you are unfimiliar the term LED, it stands for "Light Emitting Diode," and is (in simple terms) a light. So, LEDs emit  light. The Arduino chip is used to tell which LEDs to light up at a given time. It would take an extremely unreasonable amount of space (or memory) and time to program all combinations of the 256 LEDs in their ON or OFF state. To avoid wasting time, a program that can execute decisions in nanoseconds (.000001 second = 1 nanosecond) is updating the LED changes on the fly. When a certain time has past in a game of Tetris, the Tetromino (group of blocks) moves down by one unit which requires an adjustment of the states of a few LEDs. There is no need to change all 256 if only the borders of the tetromino could have changed state. 

I have an Arduino Uno that costed around $25, that I plan to create Tetris on sometime soon, before my big project: 8x8x8 LED cube. I am hesitant to add a 3rd dimension to my projects until I have mastered 2-Dimensional projects. Arduino is a very fun gadget because it bridges the world of Computer Science (Digital World) with Engineering (Physical World). The Arduino makes decisions using logic gates which all rely on microsized transistors, just like our computers. Though, our computers rely on zillions of transistors packed up into a chip called The Microprocessor


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