Sometimes it’s just plain fun to over-engineer. [Stephanie] gets a warm fuzzy feeling when she successfully adds way more electronics components to a project than she really needs – just because she can. We can’t really argue with her if that is the intended goal, nor can we find fault with the sweet Game of Life display she put together.
She started off with six Game of Life kits from Adafruit, but she quickly caught the LED bug and her collection grew until she had 20 kits (that’s 320 LEDs for those of you keeping count). After piecing them all together, they were mounted in a wooden frame and placed behind a dark piece of acrylic. It looked great and worked just fine, but it wasn’t overdone enough for her tastes.
In the end, she added a small Arduino and Xbee module to the Game of Life display, which enables it to be controlled by her network-enabled thermostat we featured a few weeks back. The thermostat was fitted with an Xbee unit as well, which allows it to turn the Game of Life on and off at whatever times [Stephanie] specifies.
We’ll take two please.
[via Adafruit Blog]
these kits use a lot of pins on the controller. hmm. I wonder if a version could be produced that charlieplexes the LEDs to add more features or use fewer controllers. Bonus points for making a module that operates with these from the kit.
Always wished they made a RGB version of that that would have different colored colonies that would “blend colors” when they started breeding with each other….
20 kits?
what do you people do as jobs to justify spending this ridiculous amount of money on something that quite frankly could have been done a lot cheaper
cant wait to see someone justify it thought!!
bracing!!
maybe they work for the company and get them free/discounted…
I just assembled a project consisting of over a thousand standard 5mm LEDs, 232 to-92 transistors, 250+ 1/8w resistors, 33 shift registers…. I’m just about done with through hole for life. There are so many component leads in the carpet on my floor it’s insane.