Students program Human Tetris into 8-bit microcontroller, give away schematics for free (video)

Sure, Project Natal is the hotness and a little bird tells us PlayStation Move is pretty bodacious, but you don't have to buy a fancy game console to sooth your motion-tracking blues. When students at Cornell University wanted to play Human Tetris (and ace a final project to boot), they taught a 20Mhz, 8-bit microcontroller how to follow their moves. Combined with an NTSC camera, the resulting system can display a 39 x 60 pixel space at 24 frames per second, apparently enough to slot your body into some grooves -- and as you'll see in videos after the break, it plays a mean game of Breakout, too. Full codebase and plans to build your own at the source link. Eat your heart out, geeks.

[Coke Posted May 16th 2010 7:11AM]

Toilet stance!

[satish Posted May 16th 2010 7:16AM]

Awesome! Salute to the good work.

[Glitch Posted May 16th 2010 7:27AM]

Awesome. :)

[manifest3r Posted May 16th 2010 5:07PM]

@Glitch I bet it's racist against black people

[Arkv2 Posted May 16th 2010 7:42PM]

@Glitch

Specially considering he did it with an ATmega644....it's way more than awesome.

[Cy Starkman Posted May 16th 2010 7:27AM]

Early 90's Mandala on Amiga. Nuff said..

[macrumpton Posted May 16th 2010 12:38PM]

@Cy Starkman An Amiga CPU in the 90's had more power than a 20mhz processor, and it had dedicated video processors to boot. This hardware is less powerful than most smartphones.

[drkow19 Posted May 16th 2010 3:05PM]

@macrumpton It's not sensitive enough. The object has to be at least the size of one block in order to show up. You should have found a way to make a block when the color difference was smaller, so you could use your hands and such like the dude tried to do in the first video. I'm sure it's done now if you already finished the class but if you do anymore work on it... Good job!

[Cy Starkman Posted May 16th 2010 7:41PM]

@macrumpton

I agree. Just trying to include the origins of things I suppose. Natal or whatever, the illusion of new.

[savagemike Posted May 16th 2010 7:28AM]

Cornell has a big robotic vision program.

[PossumK Posted May 16th 2010 9:18AM]

@savagemike This project was done for ECE 476, a digital systems design class based on using microcontrollers. Although not necessary for this project, taking the computer vision class would've made that part of the project easy.

[savagemike Posted May 16th 2010 3:58PM]

@PossumK

What microcontroller was used?

[(Unverified) Posted May 16th 2010 9:04PM]

@savagemike ATmega series. Should be either ATmega32 or ATmega644

[Zylam Posted May 16th 2010 7:43AM]

after the title and picture only God could know what the text was about

[eGGnext Posted May 16th 2010 8:10AM]

Hey, engadget, I'm really tired of not being able to view your videos on my iPod touch. Please update your site to use html5 to embed videos, or tell Steve to let us have flash! I'm sure you could pull it off.

[xTmDarren Posted May 16th 2010 8:21AM]

@eGGnext
Yeah thats Steves problem. Not Engadgets. Why not just shoot him an email- Im sure he'll be more than happy to fix your problem right after he gets done selling 1billon more of that pos ipad they have. ( Yes I baught one- and YES I sold it.)

[Sam7 Posted May 16th 2010 10:34AM]

@eGGnext

Your not alone, I can't view them on my HTC Desire, even with Flash Lite.

[HansImGlueck Posted May 16th 2010 1:12PM]

@eGGnext What's weird is that some videos work, while others show up as blank space.
And what's even weirder is that sometimes you can touch the blank space and a perfectly playable video appears.
The multiverse is weird, man!

[A25i Posted May 16th 2010 9:27AM]

Weird, I caught the switch of the pic at the top.

[Professor Hubert J Farnsworth Posted May 16th 2010 11:02AM]

Anyone else think the guy from the image resembles the man from the "Wooly Willy" toy?

[Axtor Posted May 16th 2010 12:06PM]

So its like a shit Natal?

[Antiapplekid Posted May 16th 2010 2:43PM]

Now thats epic

[skiingbeast87 Posted May 16th 2010 9:46PM]

Check out more gameplay footage at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XU0Hv0oR7c