Building a super basic 8-bit, retro handheld gaming device with wireless infrared multiplayer capability. After wrapping up my earlier Arduino-run Tetris project using a breadboard for a controller, I wanted to take a stab at packing it all onto a custom PCB and creating a super basic handheld gaming device…

After 20+ years of programming, I wanted to get some understanding of the electronics that make my career possible. I had built the basic individual logic gates with transistors on a breadboard, but to build anything meaningful I needed loads of them and so I bought a somewhat random collection…

As an exercise into understanding digital electronics and controlling matrix displays in particular, I ended up with quite an elaborate breadboard project and very crude and simple video game I dubbed Scramble: Scramble: A Simple Scrolling Game With the marquee display working, I figured it would be interesting to see if it could be expanded upon with some…medium.com The state of the game as described in that earlier post I decided was good enough to wrap…

I had a number of projects in mind that I wanted to do without the use of a microcontroller. Yet, I needed some sort of persistent data storage that was easy to access on a breadboard with just basic logic components. I decided to try and use old EEPROMs for…

With the marquee display working, I figured it would be interesting to see if it could be expanded upon with some interactive elements to turn it into a (very simple!) game. Could we fly and navigate a pixel through a scrolling field of obstacles in the style of early video…

I was interested in using an LED matrix display and I picked up some cheap 8x8 ones on Amazon. Matrix displays typically don’t have individual pins for each LED. Instead, internally the LEDs are connected in a grid pattern, exposing only the row and column terminals. …

An exercise in turning the analog input from a potentiometer into digital form. Instead of using a specialized, off the shelf ADC, this circuit uses operational amplifiers in open-loop to compare the voltage over the pot’s wiper to 7 pre-configured voltage levels produced by a resistor ladder. If the…

The same algorithm driving the LEDs as was hardwired with the 74HCxx ICs in the previous project Knight Rider Part 2, but implemented in 5 lines of Python on a Raspberry Pi running pgiozero. The code that drives the LEDs: