natnafu / fans_of_life

Interactive grid of 256 fans that play Conway's Game of Life (PSoC5)

Fans of Life

Interactive grid of 256 fans that play Conway's Game of Life.

Made for and tested on PSoC5 (CY8CKIT-059).

Description

This art project plays out Conway's Game of Life on a grid of 256 fans. A spinning fan is "alive" and a stationary fan is "dead".

If someone manually spins a fan, it will continue spinning (living).
If someone manually stops a fan, it will stay stopped (dead).

See a video of the project here.

Hardware/Firmware

The system is setup with 1 controller and 8 cells.

Cells:

• Each cell controls and reads the state of 32 fans.
• Each cell compares the commanded state to the read state to tell if a fan was manually spun.
• If a fan was manually spun, the cell will correct the commanded state (i.e. human spins fan, cell continues spinning it).

Controller:

• The controller gets the state of all the fans from the cells and constructs the full grid.
• Using the full grid, the controller calculates the next generation and sends out commands to all cells.