Arpan Mondal's Clever Air Quality Monitor Visualizes Data as a Conway's Game of Life Colony

Maker and aerospace engineer Arpan Mondal has created an air quality monitor with a difference: rather than simple numbers or a gauge with a dial, the current air quality is visualized through the medium of Conway's Game of Life.

"We are surrounded by data that we cannot see. The air quality in our cities fluctuate constantly. But usually, the only way we see this information is by reading a number on a screen like 'AQI 150.' But our brains aren't designed to care about numbers, we are designed to care about life," Mondal explains of the project's inspiration. "I recently became fascinated by Conway's Game of Life. It is a famous computer simulation where 'digital cells' live, die, and reproduce based on simple rules. It is mesmerizing to watch, but it usually exists in a digital void, completely disconnected from the real world. This gave me an idea. What if this digital life had to breathe the same air I do?"

The idea is simple — the four standard rules of Conway's Game of Life, which control which cells are able to reproduce and will die based on loneliness, overcrowding, survival, and birth, are supplemented by two new rules: a high air quality index allows the cells to thrive, seeded with new life; a low air quality index creates a "poisonous" environment with randomized cell death causing a struggling, fractured colony.

The heart of the build is a low-cost Espressif ESP32-based development board, driving a compact 1.12" single-color OLED display panel built into a 3D-printed shell designed to evoke the aesthetic of a vintage cathode-ray tube (CRT) display in miniature. A "Gardener Algorithm" ensures that the colony won't entirely die out or stagnate, to keep things interesting, while live air quality data is pulled down over the microcontroller's built-in Wi-Fi connection: anything below an AQI of 100 runs the simulation under normal rules, while >100 introduces a two percent chance of random cell death rising to five percent above an AQI of 150.

"What surprised me most about this project wasn't the code or the hardware, it was how addictive it is to just watch," Mondal notes. "The emergence of gliders skating across the screen, spaceships cruising past, oscillators blinking rhythmically… I've found myself staring at this tiny TV for hours without realizing it, the same way people watch fish tanks or crackling fires. Except this aquarium is filled with digital life that breathes my air. On days when the pollution is high, the colony visibly struggles. The bustling patterns become sparse and chaotic. It's a sobering reminder that the invisible data we ignore on our phones has real consequences, even if only for digital creatures."

The project is documented in full on Instructables, including source code and STL files under an unspecified open source license.