HN

Comments (58)

• Menu

  kangalioo
  A much cheaper way might have been to buy a couple of Novation Launchpads. 8x8 full RGB tactile buttons for 90€, MIDI-controllable. Four of those next to another for 16x16 at 360€ plus a little bit for cables and controller comes out at 1/3 the price
• Menu

  exolab
  > I figured out what would be a reasonable amount to spend on the project and then multiplied that by 10.I like the way you think.
• Menu

  Nevermark
  This is fantastic.I happen to own a physical pong table. Everyone loves it. [0] There is something magical about material and only-does-one-thing instantiations of digital things.——I am really looking forward to a flat table top screen consisting of millions of magnetically-controlled vertical-extruding rod pixels, with actual color controlled pixels along their length. For an amazing table display/extrusion of D&D dungeons and terrain, for miniatures.A little sensor ability, and when the extrusion "scrolls" laterally, it could create little lips that move the miniatures too, so they stay "in place". And move NPCs around at the DMs direction. Now turn of the room lights, and use the light pixels not just for color, but for lighting effects like wall lamps flickering, add spooky position-distributed sounds...That has to be coming soon, right?Some part of me wants to describe it Claude, iterate, and say "Now polish that design, economically optimize the parts, link in the supply chain, and ship me the first review unit." That has to be coming soon, right?The lines separating planes of reality, they are a blurring, quickly.——[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84Ymt9BAq5s
• kanapala
  Technology Will Save Us, from a brighter past, produced the Arcade Coder as their swan song. It had 12×12 tactile buttons with color leds inside, a companion app to program it with scratch like code blocks, and interactive tutorials. It's ESP32 based. There's an effort to continue it's life, ast the app was on the app store for a brief time. https://github.com/padraigfl/twsu-arcade-coder-esp32
• satiated_grue
  This would be something neat to do with a core memory array, just like this but bigger:https://www.core64.io/
• Menu

  mittermayr
  Totally off-topic, and I may be wrong, but I immediately loved the non-LLM writing-style and felt glued to the content just through the writing alone. It's getting rare.
• eps
  I saw one in a computer museum in Switzerland. It was a much larger field, it was just large orange LEDs (or were they tubes?), but it also cycled between a dozen of different cell automata games. Something about being able to see individual "pixels" made it really mesmerizing.
• Menu

  cjfd
  When 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.
• smcameron
  Something like those switches might be made very cheaply with a 3D printer, possibly a laser cutter, some transparent or semitransparent acrylic sheet, tactile switches and some LEDs. I designed a cheapo replacement for $50 tellite switches and got the price down to about $0.60 Not quite the same, as these are a lot bigger, and getting things down to the desired size might be troublesome. Anyway, here's a little video of my fake cheapo tellite switches: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaenrgPVCjc
• PetitPrince
  My Alma matter has a jumbo version of this, in which the game if life is one of several available mode https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BioWall
• Tepix
  Lovely project indeed. If you want to build your own: I found a whole bunch of much cheaper illuminated switches on AliExpress within minutes.
• mastermedo
  A thousand bucks for 17x17 touchscreen. Add a painting frame, hang it on the wall, and you made yourself amazing art for cheap.
• Menu

  MrGilbert
  I wonder if going for keyboard switches with RGB could bring the price down, if you then either print the keycaps yourself, our use a 3d printing service. 23 Cherry MX switches cost 20€, that‘s roughly 260€ for a 17x17 matrix.
• mvrckhckr
  Great idea and execution. I like your thinking.
• Cthulhu_
  I love this and would love to see it on a wall at our office or something like that. Maybe there's smaller/cheaper led/switches that would work in a handheld version.
• possiblydrunk
  Nicely done! Scale matters. If you make something big enough relative to its expected size, it will impress and captivate, even if it's simple. General observation, not that the construction here was by any means simple.
• Menu

  vunderba
  Nice. A friend of mine just picked up a Linnstrument, and I’m very tempted to create a Conway’s Game of Life-based musical visualization for it.https://www.rogerlinndesign.com/linnstrument
• Menu

  slow_typist
  Très cool.A grid of capacitive touch sensors could be printed directly on the pcb, bringing down costs by a degree of magnitude. Real switches are much more satisfying though.
• lproven
  This is fantastic, but there's no way I am taking the time to build one, and the cost is a little frightening...
• Menu

  galaxyLogic
  I wonder is there a version GoL where every bit on a computer-display or LCD TV is one cell? How does it look?
• alexb_
  This isn't what this is about, but I wonder if anyone has created a fully mechanized version of Conway's Game of Life. The fact that you only have to follow 4 rules, and each cell only needs to observe its neighbors to follow those rules, makes me wonder if it's possible to track these things mechanically. I unfortunately don't know enough about mechanical engineering to do such a thing.
• rojoroboto
  I bet that the author would really get a kick out of the T2 Tile Project.
• Menu

  jFriedensreich
  how is this real life more than a monitor, its just bigger pixels. i was expecting programmable live cells or something mechanical
• Menu

  CJefferson
  I've always wanted something like this board, buttons which can light up (preferably a few colours), to use to make games. Anyone ever found such a board which is hackable / programmable?
• meindnoch
  Eh. I thought they had somehow created a physical realization of Conway's Game of Life.
• zuiko_39182
  this matches my experience exactly
• Menu

  fwipsy
  I don't want to build this or pay for it, but I really want to mess with it for an hour.
• mkirsten
  It is beautiful
• Menu

  Traubenfuchs
  Would be interesting to do this with people and observe the inevitable mistakes they make.Now that would be simulating life witg life.
• Menu

  self_awareness
  That's not a "physical" version of game of life -- that's a digital version, like every version, but with bigger pixels.
• irenetusuq
  [dead]
• gethwhunter34
  [flagged]
• shawoodle65
  [flagged]