Conways Game of Life on a LED Cube

Conways Game of Life on a LED Cube with 16x16 LED on each side

Christian

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Description

Conway's Game of Life was one of the first programs I programmed on my CPC (in Amstrad Basic). Now I built a Cube with LED, controlled by an Arduino, to play that Game of Life.

Short summary:
* Controller: Arduino Uno
* 24 MAX7219 matrix controller
* 1536 LED 0805, red
* custom PCB

Details

Why this project?

Conway's Game of life would be a nice blinky blinky :-)
Just a plane LED panel? Boring
Infinite area would be nice, ideally a globe but.... that would be the next step (how do I place cells on a globe evenly, ideally with each cell 8 neighbours?)
So a cube.

The plan:

Should run with a Arduino Uno/Nano
16x16 LED on each side of the cube

The "final" implementation:

(Is it really final?)
Arduino Uno
24 LED Panles with
- MAX7219
- 64 red 0805 LED
Custom PCB
3D printed support
7219 library with SPI

Project Logs

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First tests and new library
Christian • 2 days ago • 0 comments
To see, if my idea work in principle, I build it all using MAX7219 modules from AZ delivery:

The test showed:
- My Idea in general is working :-D
- The library that is available on github was not sufficient.
  - It used bitbanging for the communication
  - It was only able to handle up to 8 MAX7219
So I implemented a new library using SPI and also allowing more modules (tbd: github link ;-)

The new library was x times faster (tbd: videos)

Why not simply take the already made modules: because they are sooooo thick and the edges of the cube would be not nice. Next step: custom PCBs.
- Only for the LED - to replace the thick ones?
- Or including the MAX7219 - that's what I make