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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
Printable catalog (PDF)
