Play the short video above to see what it looks like with 4 modules
In 1970, John Conway came up with a 1-player game called Game of Life. The Game of Life is a mathematical game that simulates ‘colonies’ that grow or die based on how crowded or lonely they are and is known for the way it creates a beautiful organic display out of randomness.
Here is a design for a simple electronic project that plays Conway’s Game of Life. Make one kit and keep it on your desk, or attach multiple kit modules together to create a large display.
Originally created by Dropout Design, this revision adds a few extra features. You can build the boards from the schematic and open source firmware, or buy full kits from the Adafruit shop. The kit is very easy to make and an excellent first electronics project. It is perfect for workshops since at the end everyone can connect their completed module together.
Features:
Each kit displays a 4×4 grid (16 LEDs)
Connect as many kits as youd like, in any configuration, to create a larger game board
Runs off of 2 AA batteries, but can be easily modified to run off of USB or wall-wart power
On/Off button to save power, also for resetting the display
Automatically resets if the colony has died or stagnated (regeneration)
The last incisive electronics website analysis I did was of the intriguing minicircuits.com site. (Unfortunately I was not wise enough to take a screenshot of the bizarre page, luckily archive.org has it for you to check out!)
Today I’m trying to figure out whats the story behind Potato Semiconductor.
At first I was thinking, ‘well, yknow it could mean something else in another language.’ But their logo is pretty clearly a Potato.
They reason:
Why called Potatosemi as Brand?
We are the IC design house making chips. Potato chips are the most popular chips in the world. They are high volume, low price & taste good. All of the people like to eat them. All of the people are happy with them. This is exactly our goals. We will like to make our chips as popular as potato chips, as high volume as potato chips, as low price as potato chips. All of the computers & electronics devices like our chips’ taste. All of the people like to use them because they are easy to use & all of the people are happy with potato chips.
Here is a slightly advanced hack. If you have a project that needs lots of ram for buffering data or other nonsense, you can get 10% more by cutting down the ram used in the Serial library. Unless you’re doing a project with a lot of Serial data coming in, you wont need 128 characters…I find 16 or 32 is plenty!
Open up hardware/cores/arduino directory, and edit the file named wiring_serial.c
Near the top is a #define RX_BUFFER_SIZE 128, which means 128 bytes are used for the buffer. You can change this to 32 (or even 16!). If you have almost no serial input, make it as low as you’d like as long as its > 0.
You can get another 2 bytes by changing the head and tail index values from int to uint8_t type. Just recompile your sketch and it will automatically do your thing.
If you want to make a clock with an Arduino/Boarduino/AVR, there is a way to hook up a precision 32khz watch crystal
mtbf0 shows you how! pictured above is his LCD clockduino!
Trialex followed up with a really-big-7-segment clock (in the same thread)
I made another little demo of an XPort Direct webserver tonight. This time, you can send me a short message and it will be photographed and put up on flickr.
This robot claw freaks me out a little. When I was a kid, I used to have nightmares about sticking my hand in the lobster tank at the store. Must be a New Englander thing…
There’s even a few libraries at the Arduino playground for easy use. Dave Fowler from uCHobby even started out with a great tutorial. However, I didn’t see any good tutorials on how to do the actual -connecting- part. So I took pix while I wired up one to a protoshield and tested it.
Here is an example of how to make a cool Internet application using the XPort shield I recently released. This is very simple, but its a good example of getting and outputting data. Basically the Arduino serves up a webpage with a bunch of nice javascript code that allows you to select a color. It also displays a “current color” (in this case a light green)
When you click "Submit" on the page, another request is made to the XPort/Arduino, this time with a GET command ?color=#xxxxxx with the color information. The Arduino looks for this command, parses the color requested and calls analogWrite() on the three LEDs to change them into that color.
Want to try it out? Go to -> http://ladyada.net/make/eshield/colorpickerfwd.html which will forward you to the correct IP address (since I dont have DNS for my home network). The XPort can only receive one connection at a time so if you cant get thru, please be patient!
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