Conway’s game of life on arduino

Conway’s game of life on Arduino
A 48x32 led matrix controlled by an Arduino able to project output from arbitrary sources (e.g. game of life)

Goal
To make a led matrix on which Conway’s game of life can run
And enable it to display other stuff, like
Ticker tape
Clock
Temperature
Menu navigation?

Conway’s game of life
World is a grid(x, y)
Each cell is alive or dead
Each iteration for each cell = grid(x, y):
If cell is alive,
It dies from loneliness if it has < 3 alive neighbors
It dies from food shortage if it has > 4 alive neighbors
It stays alive if it has 3 alive neighbors
If cell is dead,
It reincarnates if it has exactly 3 alive neighbors

Setup
Arduino
3 Led matrices (3 x 4x2(8x8), incl 2 controllers)
Breadboard
Wires, some resistors, leds and buttons
For fun
Thermometer
Clock

Arduino specs

ARDUINO SPECS
Microcontroller: ATmega2560
Flash memory: 256 kB
(of which 8 kB is used by bootloader)
SRAM: 8 kB
EEPROM: 4 kB
Clock speed: 16 MHz

Arduino specs
54 digital input/output pins
16 analog inputs
4 UARTs (serial ports)
16 MHz crystal oscillator
USB connection
ICSP header
Reset button

Arduino specs
54 digital input/output pins
16 analog inputs
4 UARTs (hardware serial ports)
16 MHz crystal oscillator
USB connection
ICSP header
Reset button

Wiring the system
Solder?

Wiring the system
Breadboard!

Buttons
Initialize game of life world

LED boards

LED boards
?

LED boards
No memory on controller board
Consequence: fast refresh rate needed
External power supply (5V)
16 pin connector

LED BOARDS

LED BOARD PROTOCOL
Serial data transfer
Devided into 2 halves (UDAT, LDAT)
Clock and A[2..0] to control the leds
No state-memory

LED BOARD PROTOCOL

LED BOARD PROTOCOL example
Psuedo-code for controlling the LED-board

THERMOMETER
Component: DS1820

Clock (RTC)
Solder time!

Programming arduino
Download SDK from Arduino website.
Based on Processing SDK
Write program:
void Setup() {}
void Loop() {}
Upload to Arduino (USB) and run
Monitor by serial data transfer (USB)

Programming arduino
Problem #1:
Memory too small to hold 2xLED matrix array representationAND a 3x5 font map
Problem #2:
Arduinotoo slow to fluently display Game of Life

More info
Conway’s Game of Life
http://www.edesign.nl/2010/04/22/the-game-of-office-decoration/
Arduino Mega
http://arduino.cc/en/Main/ArduinoBoardMega2560

Conway’s game of life on arduino

by jurgenwesterhof on Aug 29, 2011

Accessibility

Categories

Upload Details

Usage Rights

Statistics

Conway’s game of life on arduino — Presentation Transcript