LED Connect Four on a Circuit Board

There’s a good chance you’ve played Connect Four at one time or another, where players take turns dropping discs down a number of slots to see who can get four of them in a row. To simulate this classic game, Jamal Boujjaj was able to make his own electronic version on a PCB, with "discs" shown on a 6 x 7 LED array.

The device runs on an STM32F103 microcontroller, which drives each LED by supplying power to the anodes directly, and controls the cathodes ULN2003 Darlington array IC. The LEDs are multiplexed, with the LED signal cycling through rows one at a time.

To play the game, players take turns pressing a button above the desired column, “dropping” an LED into place until the game is complete. A reset button is provided on top of the seven drop inputs, along with a second button that starts a new game. Build files are available on GitHub if you’d like to construct your own.

The board was originally designed an event at the University of New Haven’s makerspace, where people with no previous programming experience could make a text scrolling device. While not specifically a scroller, the LED matrix could theoretically be reprogrammed to allow this behavior, and it looks like a lot of fun even before any sort of personalization!

[h/t: Reddit]