adafruit industries blog » game of life

Nice Game of Life array!

adafruit — Mon, 02 May 2011 04:00:03 +0000

Over-Engineering FTW! @ Transmissions from Planet Stephanie via Adafruit forums.

Although I know better than to call any project really ‘finished’, I’ve got my Game of Life array all set up, in a nice frame / enclosure, and with a silly complicated over-engineered way to turn it on and off by remote control.

Not the TV remote control that I had done before… that worked ok was imprecise, didn’t allow for finite control, and was succeptible to interference (spuriously turning on all the time actually.)

What I’ve got is 20 Game of Life kits assembled into a 5 x 4 array. This is roughly 20″ x 16″ in size. It’s mounted inside a wooden enclosure / frame, with a dark green acrylic front panel. The entire display is mounted on a wall in my livingroom.

In addition to the boards all being connected together normally, I’ve tied all their control buttons together so a single signal can turn them all on or off at once. This switching is handled by a PN2222 transistor. The transistor is driven by an Arduino Pro Mini, which in turn receives its commands through an XBee.

The commands originate from my DIY Thermostat across the room, which is now also XBee-equipped, and has some additional code that tells it when to turn the Game of Life on and off. The timing is based on the day of week and time of day, essentially meaning that while I’m home the GoL will be running, and while I’m at work or asleep it will be off.

There’s some code as well which lets me send the on/off commands through the network, which the thermostat relays to the Game of Life. And finally, a push-button on the thermostat can control the Game of Life, should I need/want to manually operate it.

I’ve done a more detailed write-up of the whole thing on my blog.

5×5 Game of Life Wall Art

johngineer — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 19:31:50 +0000

The IEEE Student Chapter at Seattle University created this terrific 5×5 Game of Life display to hang on the wall. aerohoff writes:

Fall 2009, as a senior at Seattle University, I was disapointed with the lack of soldering in my electrical engineering courses. As the co-chair of the IEEE student chapter, I organized a soldering workshop where each student got to solder together one Game of Life board. We connected all the boards together on a display board that will hopefully get put up on a wall somewhere. We got 25 of them together and into a 5×5 grid. The paper on the right explains the rules of Conway’s Game of Life and explains how the board came to be.

Beautiful work!

Game of Life kit reviewed…

adafruit — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 11:21:15 +0000

Nice review! Tronixstuff writes…

This month we’re looking at the Game of Life kit from adafruit industries, the team that brought us the SIM reader and other fascinating things. This kit is simple to construct, yet interesting to watch in operation, almost mesmerising. If you love blinking LEDs, this is the kit for you. Furthermore, it is very easy to construct which makes it a great kit for someone who is learning to solder.

EKG-controlled Game of Life hoodie

adafruit — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 16:42:34 +0000

Joe Saavedra writes-

The concept is a wearable version of Conway’s Game of Life, that is controlled by the current state of your life. Essentially, a wearable extension of your heart, externalized in the form of Conway’s Life. A custom circuit includes an infrared EKG monitor that resets the Game each time a heartbeat is detected. Heartbeat data is analyzed by a hackduino which resets an ATMega48 chip, part of Adafruit’s kit controlling Life, which is embedded in the chest of a hoodie. Conductive thread is used to connect the 16 LED matrix to the circuit board which is kept in a pocket towards the bottom of the hoodie.

Via MAKE!

Robosanta – powered by an Adafruit kit!

adafruit — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 00:31:43 +0000

Nick used a Game of Life kit for his Robo-Santa!

From the mail bag – 16 x 16 Game of Life!

adafruit — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 18:12:10 +0000

Sean writes in about his 16 x 16 Game of Life!

Team Adafruit, here’s a 4 board x 4 board game of life array I built over the last few weeks. Thanks for the boards and projects!

Game of Life kit building party

adafruit — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 17:02:32 +0000

Nice! Game of Life kit building party.

Amazing “Game of Life” display

adafruit — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 14:29:46 +0000

Amazing “Game of Life” 42 unit display (watch the video!)…

You can pick up the kit here…

Acrylic bezel for game of life kit

adafruit — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 21:44:02 +0000

caboteria writes-

I had been looking for an excuse to get something from ponoko.com so I made a bezel for my 2×2 matrix of game of life boards. It came out pretty well for a first effort and I’m pretty pleased with it (if I do say so myself). If anyone is interested in making one let me know and I’ll send you the svg file. I made mine from the 0.12 clear acrylic but it doesn’t need to be that thick – if I were doing it again I think I’d use the 0.08 clear.

Game of Life kits are suitable for framing

ladyada — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 05:03:11 +0000

Funny polynomial went all out with a meticulous framing of 6 Conway kits, and took advantage of the new flickr video upload feature.

There’s battery power, on/off switch and ‘wrap-around’ ribbon cabling

More to see at the flickr set…

Conway Glider

ladyada — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 21:51:53 +0000

If you’ve built a Game of Life kit, you’ll eventually notice repeating patterns emerge. Some of them are quite cool like this glider

Kits == Teamwork

ladyada — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 23:36:05 +0000

Here are two heartwarming stories of mass kitting

First is a summer program for 7th & 8th graders, that built mintyboosts

Second is a family reunion where all of the cousins built a Game of Life kit in their favorite color and then assembled them together to see them interact!