Play Tetris or Watch Blocks Stack Up the Time on This Display

It would seem that when you first get into electronics and hacking, you might order the parts you need, then a few more to make up for what you missed the first time around. Eventually, though, if you’re like Jorj Bauer, you start to acquire more and more “useful” items, which in fact go unused for years. More recently though, Bauer has come up with a novel idea, to actually make stuff with what he has “in stock,” leading to him breaking out and using his 8x32 flexible LCD panel from Adafruit.

After making a scrolling marquee with it, he realized that in a portrait orientation it made a very good display for Tetris. From there, he programmed an ESP8266 ESP-01 to run the classic game, testing everything on a web browser. With this use figured out, the device was then set into a nice wooden frame for all the world to see.

There was initially quite a bit of latency in the initial gaming setup, as it used GETs to four URLs to perform actions. After a few more iterations of the software, however, and building a remote out of perfboard, things are now quite usable, and you can find code for the project on GitHub. When you’re not actually playing Tetris on the device, it also functions as a clock, dropping bricks down in a 24-hour format!

Of course, this isn’t the only Tetris clock we’ve seen recently. Brian Lough’s build seen here is another excellent take on this type display. With his clock, though, you’ll have to reach for a different device if you actually want to play the game; it’s entirely set up to auto-drop blocks into place!