Manuel Braun’s “game of life” with PC fans… – “”DÃ©placements” consists of 24 computer case fans forming a rectangle. Each fans is “pixel”, its number of revolutions and the intensity of the light of its LED varies according to the level of gray corresponding to the pixel of reference. This screen of fans is controlled by a computer simulating a cellular automata entitled “The game of life” (created by John Horton Conway in 1970). It is a mathematical model where each fans is a cell. “Displacement” is a hijack of this object, a component of the computer becoming image. It is not a question of a physical “displacement” but of a movement, a flow.” [via] – Link.
From the MAKE store:
In 2005, the Dropout Design Team, a group of brainy MIT students decided to try something really novel and clever. They wanted to invent an electronics kit that would look cool, be simple to build, and be accessible to everyone.
Now, at the time, some of them were toying around with the idea of “cellular automata.” (A cellular automaton is merely a collection of cells on a grid whose color changes according to what’s going on in adjacent cells. The prime example of this is British math whiz John Conway’s “Game of Life”. In the Game of Life, a collection of cells lives, dies or multiplies based on a few mathematical rules.)
“Hey, let’s build a huge wall of LEDs that would enact the Conway Game of Life rules,” they said one night. “The wall could be split into identical modules, and each freshman could assemble their own module, then add the module to the collective wall.”
DDT designed an easy-to-solder kit that is cheap and scalable. Each Game of Life board contains 16 LEDs in a 4×4 grid, a microcontroller, and a communications and power distribution network. Boards can act alone, or can be plugged together, border to border, to create a larger display.
Buy it @ the MAKE store – Link.