Handheld Sudoku (Assuming You Have Large Hands)

[Hari Waguna] wanted to build a computerized Sudoku game. Ordinarily, that wouldn’t be a big deal. You can buy one, of course, but what fun is that? There’s plenty of apps for phones, but again, not much of a challenge. If you want to preserve your hacker cred, you’d use a CPU board like an Arduino or a Raspberry Pi with an LCD screen, right? But if you want to grow your hacker cred, you’d follow [Hari’s] lead and use 81 seven-segment displays and a membrane keyboard.

Driving that many displays takes some doing (in this case shift registers). [Hari] uses some other tricks, like reading the keyboard using a single pin (and a resistor network). He’s made several videos about the project, including the one below.

The PCB measures eight inches by a little over five inches. Maybe that’s handheld. Practical? Probably not. Cool? Undeniably.

We’ve seen something similar before, although perhaps not as compact. If you really want street cred, you can always try nixie tubes.

Filed under: Arduino Hacks