Conway's game of life on LED matrix

This project was just some fun I had with an 8x8 LED matrix from Adafruit where I programmed a version of Conway's "Game of Life" that runs in Micropython and displays on the LED matrix. It was a bit tricky to get it working without much memory available on the circuitplayground chip, but it works! It can do gliders, blinkers, and toads pretty well.

And a video of it in action (you can skip the soldering parts if you want)

Here is the entire program, which is fairly compact.

import board import lib.adafruit_ht16k33.matrix as M i2c = board.I2C() matrix = M.Matrix8x8(i2c) matrix.fill(0) matrix.brightness = 0.1 matrix.blink_rate = 0 # glider matrix[2,2] = 1 matrix[2,3] = 1 matrix[2,4] = 1 matrix[1,2] = 1 matrix[0,3] = 1 def print_lifeboard(new_lives): for y in range(0, 8): for x in range(0, 8): matrix[x, y] = 1 if (x,y) in new_lives else 0 def get_transition(lifeboard, x, y): cell = lifeboard[(x,y)] positions = [[x+1, y],[x+1, y+1],[x+1, y-1],[x, y+1],[x, y-1],[x-1, y+1],[x-1, y],[x-1, y-1]] num_live = sum([matrix[x % 7, y % 7] for x,y in positions]) if cell == 1 and (num_live < 2 or num_live > 3): return 0 if cell == 1 and (num_live == 2 or num_live == 3): return 1 if cell == 0 and (num_live == 3): return 1 return 0 def iterate(): global matrix while True: next_lives = [] for x in range(0, 8): for y in range(0, 8): if get_transition(matrix, x, y): next_lives.append((x,y)) print_lifeboard(next_lives) iterate()

Wesley Kerfoot

Wesley Kerfoot

Conway's game of life on LED matrix