Making a small handheld Pi Pico based game
Published on May 16, 2025The raspberry pi pico is a very cheap and small microcontroller rivaling and often beating computers from the 1980s easily.
Now for what I did to it I made it into a game called pico flip.
Pico flip is directly inspired from one of my good friends' side projects while they were learning mechatronics where the original game was made on a very heavy duty industrial computer called a PLC that had 16 switches. The original game was called flip a dip and required a good reaction time to flip a switch when a light turned on. PLCs are very expensive because of licensing and way outside of my budget but I was never able to play the original so when I heard about it I saved it for inspiration and just recently made a handheld equivalent based on a pico.
My version only has 6 buttons, 8 LEDs, 3 difficulties and 1 speaker making it much simpler to work with and easier to play. When turned on it loads a difficulty selector and a piano / hardware test where a button could be pressed and a corresponding LED would light up as well as play a corresponding note. The big button can be used to cycle through the 3 difficulties and held to load that difficulty.
Compared to the original game pico flip only has 5 buttons that can be in reach of 1 finger this gross simplification makes the game very easy but compared to the original difficult scaling is less about how long one has to flip a switch but how many buttons one has to press also aside from the 5 game LEDs there are 3 LEDs for difficult selection and displaying how many lives are left.
Working with a raspberry pi pico at a very beginner level led me to program it in micropython leading to it being somewhat slow to respond to inputs looking at more advanced ways of programming the pico which are C and assembly for picos are much harder to work with specifically assembly as debugging becomes more difficult however for a version 1 this project is successful and as the pico supports 28 inputs a 16 switch pico would be possible.
Until then have a good day bye! 👋