While it’s great to look at professional maker projects that use motion tracking cameras or giant 3D prints that break the bank, it’s also nice to look at simple Arduino builds too.

This project takes the classic game of Connect Four and turns it into a game played with a small joystick. An Arduino Pro Mini and generic microcontroller act as the brains with a matrix of LEDs acting as the playing field.

Players take turns dropping in red or green “discs” from the row of LEDs into the playing area, and first to get four wins.

This was also a very cheap project to make, as the creator states that the microcontroller and push button joystick both cost £0.99 (~R17) each from eBay.

To replicate this build head on over to Instructables to find a full guide as well as wiring diagrams and the code for the game.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen this kind of game made using an LED matrix as a stand-in screen where each light may represent a pixel. There was this one player version of Pong from February that we liked too.