My concept:
I want to do a visualization of Conway’s game of life in real life, but I didn’t want it to be something boring or just simple, so after a long while of searching for inspiration, I landed on infinity mirrors.
The way these work is that there is LED lights sandwiched between 2 mirrors, the back mirror is fully reflective, and the front mirror is a two-way mirror, where its partially reflective and partially transparent. The way it creates this illusion with a single line of LED is:
– LED’s inside emit light.
– Some light goes straight out through the front
– Some light reflects off the back mirror
– The reflected light hits the front mirror again, part of it escapes to your eyes and part of it reflects back inside
– This keeps bouncing back and forth
Each bounce loses a bit of intensity, so you see a chain of dimmer and dimmer reflections that look like they’re going deep into the mirror.
So the main idea is the simulation of the game of life, however the user can decide which cells to start with, or make it random, or add new cells while the simulation is running.
Arduino:
The Arduino is going to be controlling which LED lights turn on, I bought WS2812B LED strip lights which allows me to control each led in a strip individually. I might add a potentiometer and buttons for reset or changing the light brightness or speed of simulation, however I will decide on this depending on how building the project goes.
P5:
This will handle the simulation aspect of it, it will calculate what cells live or die in the next generation and sends these updates to the Arduino so it turns on or off the respective LED’s, if I can’t manage to have an external control panel, then my backup plan will just be having the panel be done in p5js with a UI a user can control.
Progress:
I used the stipend to buy the resources needed for this project which are:
– Black foam boards for the base: https://www.amazon.ae/dp/B0D3Y656M2?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_fed_asin_title
– 5 Meter WS2812B LED strips: https://www.amazon.ae/dp/B0D1Y995V6?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_fed_asin_title
– Reflective mirror stickers: https://www.amazon.ae/dp/B0FY2GBZ2S?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_fed_asin_title
– Clear acrylic sheet: https://www.amazon.ae/dp/B0CK4XFZ8D?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_fed_asin_title
– One way privacy film: https://www.amazon.ae/dp/B0GCYXYK5L?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_fed_asin_title