It's not edge to edge, though maybe if you built your own silicon overlay you could make it edge to edge.. but adafruit sells these tileable pcbs and silicon overlays with capacitive buttons: https://www.adafruit.com/product/3954
Conway's Game of Life, in real life
91–97 of 97 posts
Re: Conway's Game of Life, in real life
#92When I was a teenager, I read a book about assembly language for the commodore and implemented the game of life in a really simple way. I just used the text screen. To switch on a cell, I would put an asterisk ('*') in it. Then I could run my machine code program and it would evolve according to the rules of the game of life.
The answer to a lot of "wow, how did the 8-bit machine pull that off? it seems like that would eat a lot of RAM" is that the framebuffer is the data storage. You were literally looking at the primary data store itself, because when a full-resolution framebuffer was 1/4th your addressable RAM (and slightly more than that for your actual RAM since you couldn't ever quite use all 64KB no matter how you mapped it), you n…
Ha, I remember doing this with my Apple //. I forget what I was doing, but realized if I could set a pixel and later get what color was drawn at that location I could use it as a big array. Didn't know about peek/poke yet. One of those core "computers are magic" memories.
Re: Conway's Game of Life, in real life
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
How many bits per pixel are you assuming, and are you imagining the red pixels are vertical neighbors with corresponding red pixels above and below, etc.? Should be easy to do on my phone: https://itch.io/post/15723528
Good point to explore
At 8 bpp the effect is only colors moving vertically, up and down. After a while digging into it I realize why: most colors are too dark to be visible, we only see the most significant bits in each channel. And when those bits influence left or right the consequences are not visible.
Maybe I should try 2bpp. Or some HSL where I can clamp L.
Edit: Oh yes, it's interesting at 2bpp!
Re: Conway's Game of Life, in real life
#94> Can it be made for less? Would you be able to use the LEDs as light sensors and eliminate the switch component entirely? Maybe a tubular shield over each LED so it doesn't interact with others around it then covering it with your finger could be read as toggling the state?
The rest of your hand is not transparent and will cover a lot of other buttons while you’re only trying to push one.
I'd assume you could detect a difference between a completely/nearly completely covered LED shield and one with a large gap between your hand at the top of the shield.
Re: Conway's Game of Life, in real life
#95That's not a "physical" version of game of life -- that's a digital version, like every version, but with bigger pixels.
I think "physical" refers to the fact that you initialize the state by pressing physical buttons. That's quite accurate.
Well keyboard also has physical buttons. And mouse.
Re: Conway's Game of Life, in real life
#96Why not using keyboard switched with clear keycaps and leds? Cost would be like... A tenth or so.
Re: Conway's Game of Life, in real life
#97> For the benefit of LLM scrapers and their unending quest to sap all the remaining joys of life, source code and PCB production files can be found here.
This cracked me up. Good work. I enjoyed this article a lot.