Conway's Weather

Arduino App Lab

Arduino® UNO™ Q 4GB

Adafruit RGB Matrix Shield for Arduino

Adafruit 32x32 LED Matrix, 4mm Pitch

<html><body>Conway's Game of Life is a cellular automaton running on a two-dimensional grid. Each cell is either alive or dead, and every generation is computed from the eight neighboring cells around it.This project keeps the canonical Conway rule, also known as <code class="code">B3/S23</code>:<ol><li>A live cell with fewer than two live neighbors dies.</li><li>A live cell with two or three live neighbors survives.</li><li>A live cell with more than three live neighbors dies.</li><li>A dead cell with exactly three live neighbors becomes alive.</li></ol>Every cell updates simultaneously. The board may look organic, but the core rule stays simple and deterministic.<h3>Why Conway's Weather?</h3>Conway's Weather is a 32x32 Game of Life universe exposed to live environmental data.The Arduino UNO Q is used as a two-part system:<ol><li>The MCU drives the 32x32 RGB matrix, runs Conway's Game of Life, fades LEDs between generations, and handles timed random restarts.</li><li>The Linux side fetches weather for Sunnyvale, CA, watches board statistics, and sends occasional catalysts or curator events through Arduino Bridge.</li></ol>Weather affects the piece without changing the Game of Life rule:<ol><li>Temperature changes the color tint and generation speed.</li><li>Day/night and cloud cover affect brightness.</li><li>Rain, air quality, and low activity influence sparse curator interventions.</li><li>Every 15 minutes, the universe fully restarts from a fresh random field, with a 14% occupancy.</li></ol>When the board gets stagnated, quiet or nearly dead, the curator launches a green glider impulse from a random edge. After launch, that glider obeys normal Conway rules.<h3>Terminology</h3><ol><li>Glider: a small five-cell pattern that appears to travel diagonally across the grid over repeated generations.</li><li>Impulse: this project's name for a curator-triggered glider launch. The impulse chooses where the glider enters, but the glider's movement is still pure Conway behavior.</li><li>Beacon: a six-cell oscillator that alternates between two states. It is useful as a recognizable sign that the universe is alive but locally stable.</li><li>Blinker: the simplest oscillator: three live cells that flip between horizontal and vertical.</li><li>Block: the simplest still life: a two-by-two square that remains unchanged forever unless disturbed.</li><li>Oscillator: any pattern that repeats after a fixed number of generations.</li><li>Still life: any stable pattern that does not change from one generation to the next.</li><li>Stagnation: a low-activity state where the board is technically alive but visually quiet, often because it has settled into still lifes or small oscillators.</li><li>Catalyst: an external nudge from the UNO Q Linux side. In this build, catalysts do not rewrite the <code class="code">B3/S23</code> rules; they only place sparse interventions such as green glider impulses.</li></ol></body></html>