Here's an almost completed project which represents Conway's Game of Life on a cube of 32x32 RGB LED panels. It uses a Teensy4.0 and a SmartLED shield to drive 6 LED panels connected in a single chain, and then arranged as a cube. A Raspberry Pi Zero W is connected to the Teensy to provide over-the-air updates and will eventually allow for other functionality such as configuration and status updates through a web interface. Everything with the exception of power is contained within the cube.
A couple of twists that I have added to this adaptation are some randomness to the governing rules and spontaneity that will allow life to take hold starting from completely empty cells. I'm not claiming this to be a unique implementation and I didn't do research on any similar projects, so I don't know if there's anything else out there that might be a better solution. I'm also planning to add additional cell state rules that have been previously published where a cell can have more than two states. I have several other ideas on variations to the basic rules with the goal that the display never reaches a stable state. The premise of these changes is that there are no guarantees in life!
As soon as I can figure out a suitable video sharing option I'll post a link. Probably something like YouTube, but I don't have a channel there yet. I have a couple of videos. One that shows how the faces of the cube wrap around to each other, so that a pattern such as a Glider will move correctly from one panel to the next. The second video shows an oscillating pattern that would typically persist but in my version of the game actually disappears after a while due to the randomness I've included. The same oscillator could just as likely have morphed in to something else, but hey, it's random!
A couple of twists that I have added to this adaptation are some randomness to the governing rules and spontaneity that will allow life to take hold starting from completely empty cells. I'm not claiming this to be a unique implementation and I didn't do research on any similar projects, so I don't know if there's anything else out there that might be a better solution. I'm also planning to add additional cell state rules that have been previously published where a cell can have more than two states. I have several other ideas on variations to the basic rules with the goal that the display never reaches a stable state. The premise of these changes is that there are no guarantees in life!
As soon as I can figure out a suitable video sharing option I'll post a link. Probably something like YouTube, but I don't have a channel there yet. I have a couple of videos. One that shows how the faces of the cube wrap around to each other, so that a pattern such as a Glider will move correctly from one panel to the next. The second video shows an oscillating pattern that would typically persist but in my version of the game actually disappears after a while due to the randomness I've included. The same oscillator could just as likely have morphed in to something else, but hey, it's random!
