Joel Lewis' MicroPong Is the Atari Classic You Know and Love — But the Size of a Penny
Built around an STMicroelectronics STM32, this accelerometer-controlled tennis game is about as small as it gets.
Embedded systems engineer Joel Lewis has built one of, if not the, smallest self-contained Pong machine in history, MicroPong — designed to fit in the footprint of a penny.
"The goal of this project was to see how small of a form factor Pong could be crammed into and still be considered playable," Lewis explains of his project. "While the hardware is fully functional, there is still significant work to be done on the firmware side of things."
That hardware is an STMicroelectronics STM32L0 microcontroller mounted beneath a 0.42" OLED display panel. A 30mAh lithium-polymer battery powers everything, and in place of traditional paddle controls or pushbutton switches the game is handled using an accelerometer — allowing the whole unit to be tilted in order to control the paddle movement.
Inspired by earlier tennis games on mainframe computers, Pong was developed by Atari's Allan Alcorn for release as an arcade cabinet and is generally recognized as the first commercially successful video game — thanks in no small part to the first test unit "breaking down" after installation in a pub, an issue which turned out to be its coin bucket overflowing with quarters.
MicroPong, by contrast, won't be taking any coins — for the simple reason that it's roughly the same size, in footprint at least, as a penny.
More information is available on Hackaday.io, with source code, schematic, and PCB design files.