This Raspberry Pi Pico Game Totally Slaps

This Raspberry Pi Pico game, created by Thomas Roth (aka Stacksmashing), is just as fun to make as it is to play! Roth assembled this custom LED button-pressing game using 20 arcade buttons and a spare wooden board—all powered by the Pico microcontroller.

This isn’t the first of Roth’s creations we’ve covered, as he recently released this open source Pico Debug’n’Dump kit. It is, however, the first complete game of his we’ve shared. According to Roth, the game was assembled in a few hours including the time it took to both physically construct the board as well as program the game. 

The two-player game is sort of like competitive whack-a-mole, and it outputs scores in real-time to a laptop display. Each player must press a button when its illuminated. The player who presses the most within the allotted time frame wins the round.

The Pico is responsible for handling all of the logic as well as input data from players. To get a visual readout of the scores, Roth used a laptop because it was handy to him but anyone recreating the project could use a dedicated screen. In this case, the display information is transferred to the laptop from the Pico using a web app called WebUSB.

We always insist that the best Raspberry Pi projects are ones you can recreate yourself and Roth was kind enough to share all of the code used in the game to GitHub for any interested parties.

To see this game in action, visit Roth's original Twitter thread and be sure to follow Stacksmashing for more cool projects.