The 2025 One Hertz Challenge asks you to build a project that does something once every second. While that has inspired a lot of clock and timekeeping builds, we’re also seeing some that do entirely different things on a 1 Hz period. [junkdust] has entered the contest with a project that does something rather mathematical once every second.
[junkdust] wanted to get better acquainted with the venerable ATtiny85, so decided to implement Conway’s Game of Life on it. The microcontroller is hooked up to a 0.91″ OLED display with a resolution of 128 x 32 pixels, however, [junkdust] only elected to implement a 32 x 32 grid for the game itself, using the rest of the display area to report the vital statistics of the game. On power up, the grid is populated with a random population, and the game proceeds, updating once every second.
It’s a neat little desk toy, but more importantly than that, it served as a nicely complicated test project for [junkdust] to get familiar working inside the limitations of the ATtiny85. It may be a humble part, but it can do great things, as we’ve seen many times before!
If I’m going to write Conway’s Game of Life I’m using ALL the pixels!
You’d have to use more than just an Attiny85. 128×32 is exactly how many bits of RAM it has.
You could store the simulation in EEPROM instead of RAM. But with an endurance of 100,000 read/writes, a 1Hz game of life would wear it out in a little over a day.
Maybe a PS-RAM module would be a better solution?
Its been a while since I’ve used one of those little oled screens, if can you read a pixels status you got your ram right there.
CGOL is mostly empty space, 90% at least, I bet you can cook up some sort of RLE or tiling.