Conway's Game of Life is zero-player mathematical simulation based on cellular automata. It has very simple rules (see the Wikipedia link above) and it's often presented as a programming task for beginner developers.
Rainbowduino is Arduino clone intended for driving of 8*8 RGB LED matrix.
This project brings the two together - implements the Game of Life on Rainbowduino and its many clones.
I also designed a nice case for this project, which can be 3D printed and you can download it on Thingiverse. The entire thing can be seen in action on YouTube.
My intention was to create some nice aesthetics with the Rainbowduino. The Game of life is preferred over just randomly blinking lights for its specific meaning and general fun. The implementation detects finite states and just resets the field with random values. It does not detect oscillations between two or more states, but will reset to random state every 120 steps (configurable) anyway.
The implementation is very straightforward and intended to be used also as a teaching tool when practical. The code readability is preferred over effectivity, because we update the state only once per second anyway.
My cheap Chinese clone of Rainbowduino does not have any GPIO ports at all, neither analog or digital ones. The Rainbowduino is generally intended to serve just as a display driver and expects to be run by something better, so this is not generally a big limitation. So there isn't any source of randomness at all, which makes seeding the random number generator impossible.
I discovered that the A6 and A7 inputs do oscillate a bit, so I implemented a method which tries to extract some entropy from them. It's not very good and I don't recommend this approach for anything more important than pretty blinkenlights.
I'm using Visual Studio 2015 and the "Visual Micro Arduino IDE" plugin for Arduino projects. You may ignore the additional files (.sln, .vcxproj, .vcxproj.filters) and work only with .ino in Arduino IDE.
Copyright (c) Michal Altair Valasek, 2016
Licensed under terms of the MIT license.