Make:

Nathan just sent in what the gang from Spark Fun is bringing to Maker Faire, he writes -

What is this thing? It's the game of Tetris but played on a device that is composed of 240 buttons. So if you want to move the Tetris block right/left, you simply touch a button left or right of the current piece. To rotate a block you touch a button in one of the top two rows. And to drop a block you touch the bottom row. It's a hands on Tetris game!

We had seen the Monome project at the 2006 Maker Faire and it intrigued us. The idea that the button color could interact with the person touching the button was a great idea. It's like the rubberized buttons on your TV remote, but with an LED behind the button. So when you touch a certain button, the LEDs around (or in) that button change. The monome project only had room for a 3mm diameter LED. We wanted more! So we designed a 4x4 button pad that could utilize a 5mm diameter LED, and then we could go crazy with our RGB LEDs!

16 microcontrollers
Total of 256 MIPS
720 LEDs
1.5A current draw
1300 lines of code
28800 bits being updated per second
9 people