In the weeks leading up to Halloween, old-school hacker and DIY creator Nathan Pryor decided to build a Tetris pumpkin. While the initial idea was to grow pumpkins in the shape of Tetrominos, he knew he didn't have enough time, so he switched to Plan B: Creating a playable version of the game with a pumpkin.
Pryor soldered, carved, hacked, and coded for about 12 hours, over the course of a week and a half, ending with a real pumpkin carved and constructed to play a real version of Tetris by using its stem as the controller. The entire project required 128 LEDs, 256 pieces of heat-shrink tubing and 313 solder joints, according to Pryor's blog.
After creating a grid of LEDs and programming the code on a bamboo prototyping board, Pryor drilled out holes, turned those holes into perfect little squares and installed his set up by using an Arduino board and eight rechargeable AA batteries.
The joystick was created by neatly cutting off the pumpkin's stem, drilling a bolt into the stem and attaching it to a short handled joystick from SparkFun.
The entire project set Pryor back $100, he says.
Make sure to check out the blog for a detailed report of his work and some amazing pictures of the step-by-step process.
Pryor jokes that his next step is loading Halo into a watermelon, but we all know that the real test is getting a gord to run Doom.
