Tetris LED tie: Dress for retro-gaming success

A peek under the skin of the Tetris tie.

(Credit: Bill Porter)

Maker and teacher Bill Porter had a very important task ahead of him. He had to impress more than 100 eighth graders at a STEM camp. He had already wowed them with an LED lab coat and an 8-bit tie, but they wanted to know what was next. So Porter invented the Tetris tie, a glowing LED tribute to the classic falling-blocks game.

It took Porter about four hours to get the working prototype up and running. The tie uses 80 LED pixels powered by a DigiSpark microcontroller. It cost about $50 in materials.

Showing ingenuity and the ability to work with parts on hand, Porter fashioned the tie itself from two pieces of card stock and a cheap clip-on tie. The clip-on feature is the nerdy icing on the geeky make-cake. “I plan to revisit the design and embed the strips directly into a fabric tie for long-term use,” Porter writes.

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