SandwichRising's Wood and Circuit Sculpture Is an Aesthetic Take on Conway's Game of Life

Pseudonymous maker "SandwichRising" has built a wooden, Arduino-compatible circuit sculpture designed to play out Conways' Game of Life on a custom LED matrix — and has released the design under a permissive open source license.

"This project spanned three separate periods," SandwichRising explains by way of background. "110 hours were spent developing the original software and building a circuit sculpture for a separate 6×6 design which maxed the CPU capabilities; 20 hours were spent doing a technical analysis, refactoring, and write-up of the data structure to scale from 6×6 to larger sizes; 130 hours over three weeks were then spent developing this project into new physical hardware."

That new physical hardware is a wooden chassis with a custom-built 8×8 LED matrix dominating its front. A Microchip ATmega328P microcontroller appears to float above the matrix in a cut-out section of the multi-layer sculpture, inside a frame on which is etched the rules for mathematician John Conway's famous cellular automaton: cells with two or three neighbors survive, a dead cell with three living neighbors comes back to life, and all other cells die in the next turn.

"The sculpture creates a random gameboard using a floating microcontroller pin, and then applies Conway’s rules to evolve which cells live or die," SandwichRising explains. "The floating pin can detect random energy in the air to seed the RNG [Random Number Generator]. The gameboard itself represents an infinitely repeating 8x8 grid in every direction, as the top/bottom and left/right sides are considered 'touching' for the evolution process."

The custom wooden housing is milled from poplar wood, with feet of sapele, with everything — including the single-sided PCBs housing the electronics including the microcontroller and 74HC595 shift registers for the rows of LEDs — sealed with a polyurethane spray for protection. "The LED PCBs [are] assembled using the bus PCB, and the brain PCB was attached using solid-core wire (to create a floating effect) and a thin data wire was run to the data-in of the first LED PCB," SandwichRising explains.

"All the data-out/data-in ports on the LED PCBs were then connected using solid core wire along the side of the structure," SandwichRising continues. "The USB port was also connected to the bus PCB, but only 5v and GND were connected to the USB port. Once all testing was complete, a standalone 328P was flashed with the program (using the internal oscillator) and the circuit was attached to the housing with screws."

The full project write-up is available on SandwichRising's GitHub repository, along with design files and source code made available under the permissive MIT license.