Where’s the long piece? I’m looking for a long piece. Hello?
You might be familiar independent designers and craftspeople who make and trade wooly hats and pleated skirts, plus resin-covered succulents in different dirts. Oh yes, you’ve been to Etsy before. But there’s also a pretty health cottage economy in tiny tech tinkerers, too. Sure, a lot of them base their work around keyboard switches and emulator kits. Sometimes, though, all it takes is a tiny Tetris machine to get everyone’s attention and that’s just what one British designer has done.
Ali, who goes by the moniker Ampersand, has created a little palm-sized something (if your palm is 4cm or 1.6 inches wide) called the Asterisk (via Liliputing). Sure, it definitely looks like said symbol — maybe you can take that with a grain of salt, but that’s just our meta-humor at work. More importantly, users can play a “falling-block puzzle game” on its tiny 0.91″ monochrome OLED display using the four controls on the “legs” of the Asterisk. Ampersand notes that their high score currently stands at 57,740.
If you’re looking to try and beat the creator at their own game (or is it Alexey Pajitnov’s?), well, unfortunately, you can’t. As of press time, the Asterisk is out of stock at Ampersand’s Tindie page right now and it’s not clear if and when they’ll make more to ship out. It’s $20, shipping excluded, and needs a CR2032 button-cell battery.
You might want to try making your own machine, though. The Asterisk uses a Microchip ATtiny85 as its microcontroller and the Arduino source code is available for all to play around with. Just make sure you don’t have more fun building the thing than you actually would playing it. Or maybe you should have fun making and just gift the result to someone you care about. What we’re saying here is to have fun.
And after you’re done making that, maybe you can move onto Google Japan’s carp-y teacup keyboard.
