I’ve mostly automated the setup of the software for the Life display frame software. You can find the scripts here on GitHub . Running this requires a Linux system with ansible and git installed.
I am running this on a Raspberry Pi ZeroW , but it should work on just about anything running Debian Linux .
This uses the lite version of Raspberry Pi OS without a GUI. You should download the correct one for your hardware, expand the image, and write it to an SD Card:
Last year I wrote about my sdl2-life program, adding color to it, and seeding it with data from my website logs. This time I’ve decided to make a dedicated wall display for it using an Adafruit touchscreen display and a Raspberry Pi Zero that I bought back before they became unobtainable.
After a bunch of experiments with the design I managed to make a display that won’t fall off the wall and it looks reasonably nice.
After letting the life server I wrote about last month run for a bit I decided that all white cells are a bit boring and I started exploring ways to add some color to it. First step was to keep track of the age of the cells, and I decided that new cells should inherit the age of the cells that created it in the hope that it would be more visually snazzy.
A few years back I was experimenting with Go and SDL2, I wrote a dead-simple Conway's Game of Life program with it, added loading of a couple popular pattern file formats, and was pretty much finished with it. The other day I came across this cool project while preparing for Thanksgiving by browsing infosec.exchange . Brett has an e-ink display running life and is seeding it from tarpit data which struck me as a really neat idea to keep the world from becoming static as most of the more complex ones tend to do.
