Game of Life

J

jacobbiljo

New Member
I was simply wondering if there has been any consideration of developing COnway's Game of Life for the picaxe. I had always been interested in making a coffee table and this looks like a visualization that will be great for it.
Thanks for any advice

Jacob
 
hippy

hippy

Ex-Staff (retired)
I think the real challenge comes in having a large enough number of elements to make a physical Game of Life worthwhile, and then the processing time taken to update all those elements.

This uses a 16 x 16 display and looks reasonably impressive ...

http://www.sparetimegizmos.com/Hardware/Life_Game.htm

I suspect the larger and more colourful the better, though one could go the other way and use 8x8 or 5x8 single dot matrix modules.

The two main work is in wiring the thing up ( a bit easier if using dot matrix modules ) and designing efficient coding algorithms.
 
J

jacobbiljo

New Member
yes i had seen that board and it is very interesting, along side that there is also the circuit made by MakerShed which is more spaced out and allows connectivity between modules.
http://www.makershed.com/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=MKAD3
this larger spacing is much better for something like a coffee table and it also divides the computing power out amongst many controllers so that large data handling is not a problem.
 
R

retepsnikrep

Senior Member
Good idea!

I like this idea for a game of life coffee table,

I suspect a chip with the 1024 byte scratch pad would be best to represent a 32x32 grid. The ram to get reasonable speed and some sort of multiplexed latches to drive led's or whatever under the table.

A little 4 button joyswtich could be used for setting up the game and some pre-programmed layouts in eeprom which can be loaded in a jiffy from some sort of menu.

Hmm I'm tempted
 
J

jacobbiljo

New Member
ya id like to try something like this too but ive never gotten that much into fancy algorithms just simple programming, picaxes have mostly just been a tool in my mostly analog interests. Building a table or soldering all the leds really isnt all that daunting.
 
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