A few weeks ago I showed a project I had created to monitor the temperature in my son’s bedroom. Like many toddlers he is fascinated by lights and patterns of lights.
This got me thinking to how I could create a interesting light effect for his bed room based of science and technology.
After a little consideration I decided to implement the Game of Life created by Conway in 1970. The Game of Life is a Cellular Automaton zero player game in which the player watches evolution over a number of generations.
Based on a two dimensional grid each cell within the grid lives, dies or reproduces based upon the following rules.
Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbors dies, replicating under population.
Any live cell with two or three live neighbors lives on to the next generation.
Any live cell with more than three live neighbors dies, replicating overpopulation
Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbors becomes a live cell, replicating reproduction.
To display the Game of Life, it’s evolution I decided to use a number of NeoPixel 8 by 8 panels. This allowed me to create a 256 pixel array on which I can display the game of life in up to 16 million colors.
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