Planet Arduino

Well all know cellular automata from Conway’s Game of Life which simulates cellular evolution using rules based on the state of all eight adjacent cells. [Gavin] has been having fun playing with elementary cellular automata in his spare time. Unlike Conway’s Game, elementary automata uses just the left and right neighbors of a cell to determine the next cell ahead in the row. Despite this comparative simplicity, some really complex patterns emerge, including a Turing-complete one.

[Gavin] started off doing the calculations by hand for fun. He made some nice worksheets for this. As we can easily imagine, doing the calculations by hand got boring fast. It wasn’t long before his thoughts turned to automating his cellular automata. So, he put together an automatic cellular automator. (We admit, we are having a bit of fun with this.)

This could have been a quick software project but half the fun is seeing the simulations on a purpose-built ecosystem. The files to build the device are hosted on Thingiverse. Like other cellular automata projects, it uses LED matrices to display the data. An Arduino acts as the brain and some really cool retro switches from the world’s most ridiculously organized electronics collection finish the look of the project.

To use, enter the starting condition with the switches at the bottom. The code on the Arduino then computes and displays the pattern on the matrix. Pretty cool and way faster than doing it by hand.

RuntimeProject made a tutorial to create a little cellular automata on a small 126×64 OLED using Arduino Nano.

He worked on one type of cellular automata, the Game of Life by John Conway, which has a grid of cells each having 2 states True or False/on or off/alive or dead. These cells are governed by 2 simple rules:

Rule 1: A cell which is dead and is surrounded by exactly 3 alive cells, will be born

Rule 2: A cell which is alive and has either 3 or 2 alive cells will remain alive, else it dies

The Arduino-based Cellular Automata works using 2 libraries the,  Adafruit GFX library  to handle all graphics and text displayed on the OLED;
Adafruit SSD1306 library which is the driver for the OLED.

You can read more info on how to make it on his blog and download the sketch on Github.