Conway’s Game of Life-Based Lighting #Neopixels

From Adam Taylor on Hackster.io:

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.

Read more and see more on YouTube


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