Pseudonymous maker “SandwichRising” has constructed a wood, Arduino-compatible circuit sculpture designed to play out Conways’ Recreation of Life on a {custom} LED matrix — and has launched the design beneath a permissive open-source license.

“This mission spanned three separate intervals,” SandwichRising explains by means of background. “110 hours have been spent creating the unique software program and constructing a circuit sculpture for a separate 6×6 design which maxed the CPU capabilities; 20 hours have been spent doing a technical evaluation, refactoring, and write-up of the info construction to scale from 6×6 to bigger sizes; 130 hours over three weeks have been then spent creating this mission into new bodily {hardware}.”

That new bodily {hardware} is a wood chassis with a custom-built 8×8 LED matrix dominating its entrance. A Microchip ATmega328P microcontroller seems to drift above the matrix in a cut-out part of the multi-layer sculpture, inside a body on which is etched the principles for mathematician John Conway’s well-known mobile automaton: cells with two or three neighbors survive, a lifeless cell with three dwelling neighbors comes again to life, and all different cells die within the subsequent flip.

“The sculpture creates a random gameboard utilizing a floating microcontroller pin, after which applies Conway’s guidelines to evolve which cells dwell or die,” SandwichRising explains. “The floating pin can detect random vitality within the air to seed the RNG [Random Number Generator]. The gameboard itself represents an infinitely repeating 8×8 grid in each route, as the highest/backside and left/proper sides are thought of ‘touching’ for the evolution course of.”

The {custom} wood housing is milled from poplar wooden, with ft of sapele, with the whole lot — together with the single-sided PCBs housing the electronics together with the microcontroller and 74HC595 shift registers for the rows of LEDs — sealed with a polyurethane spray for cover. “The LED PCBs [are] assembled utilizing the bus PCB, and the mind PCB was connected utilizing solid-core wire (to create a floating impact) and a skinny information wire was run to the data-in of the primary LED PCB,” SandwichRising explains.

“All of the data-out/data-in ports on the LED PCBs have been then related utilizing strong core wire alongside the aspect of the construction,” SandwichRising continues. “The USB port was additionally related to the bus PCB, however solely 5v and GND have been related to the USB port. As soon as all testing was full, a standalone 328P was flashed with this system (utilizing the inner oscillator) and the circuit was connected to the housing with screws.”

The total mission write-up is out there on SandwichRising’s GitHub repository, together with design information and supply code made accessible beneath the permissive MIT license.