Something like those switches might be made very cheaply with a 3D printer, possibly a laser cutter, some transparent or semitransparent acrylic sheet, tactile switches and some LEDs. I designed a cheapo replacement for $50 tellite switches and got the price down to about $0.60 Not quite the same, as these are a lot bigger, and getting things down to the desired size might be troublesome. Anyway, here's a little video of my fake cheapo tellite switches: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaenrgPVCjc
A much cheaper way might have been to buy a couple of Novation Launchpads. 8x8 full RGB tactile buttons for 90€, MIDI-controllable. Four of those next to another for 16x16 at 360€ plus a little bit for cables and controller comes out at 1/3 the price
Totally off-topic, and I may be wrong, but I immediately loved the non-LLM writing-style and felt glued to the content just through the writing alone. It's getting rare.
I have not felt that it was becoming rare. Certainly on platforms like YouTube you can see automated processes cranking blandness at scale. I haven't found it encroaching on the topics that interest me like toy electronic projects, how some ancient game rendered its Sprites, colour space analysis, or a compiler that fits in a tweet,
I'm sure there are an abundant source of 'How I hustled a thumpawangy into $1000 a month in subscriptions" written by AI, but I doubt I could perceive a loss in that compared to the ones we had before.
Personally, I can barely stomach reading LLM writing. I find myself closing lots of articles after a sentence or two. I wonder how this plays out longer-term regarding engagement.
I wonder if going for keyboard switches with RGB could bring the price down, if you then either print the keycaps yourself, our use a 3d printing service. 23 Cherry MX switches cost 20€, that‘s roughly 260€ for a 17x17 matrix.
I saw one in a computer museum in Switzerland. It was a much larger field, it was just large orange LEDs (or were they tubes?), but it also cycled between a dozen of different cell automata games. Something about being able to see individual "pixels" made it really mesmerizing.
When I was a teenager, I read a book about assembly language for the commodore and implemented the game of life in a really simple way. I just used the text screen. To switch on a cell, I would put an asterisk ('*') in it. Then I could run my machine code program and it would evolve according to the rules of the game of life.
You could also 4x the resolution by using half- and quarter-block characters from the top half of the ASCII table (or it'd be the PETSCII one i C64 case).
Exactly. It's even how I taught myself extremely basic Pascal -- getting my BASIC Life program running in Pascal. With asterisks.
A taught a friend at uni, who was a much better programmer than me, how the algorithm worked. He did a pixel-by-pixel version in machine code, but it was a bit slow on a ZX Spectrum.
So he did exactly the quarter-character-cell version you describe. I wrote the editor in BASIC, and he wrote a machine-code routine that kicked in when told and ran the generations. For extra fun he emitted some of the intermediate state to the border, so the border flashed stripes of colour as it calculated, so you could see it "thinking". Handy for static patterns -- you could see it hadn't crashed.
I've been considering doing a quarter-cell Mandelbrot for about 30Y now. Never got round to it yet.
Nicely done! Scale matters. If you make something big enough relative to its expected size, it will impress and captivate, even if it's simple. General observation, not that the construction here was by any means simple.
I love this and would love to see it on a wall at our office or something like that. Maybe there's smaller/cheaper led/switches that would work in a handheld version.
A grid of capacitive touch sensors could be printed directly on the pcb, bringing down costs by a degree of magnitude. Real switches are much more satisfying though.
I want to do a game like lights out. I'm thinking in 3d printing transparent caps and using dirt chip pcb switches and standard leds. The cost must be also down to 30 cts. Would be like a middle ground.
Do you mean every pixel or every sub-pixel?
Sub-pixel is interesting because the geometry of the grid isn't going to be the same from one screen to the other. It might also look compressed horizontally.
I've always wanted something like this board, buttons which can light up (preferably a few colours), to use to make games. Anyone ever found such a board which is hackable / programmable?
The device that I think popularized that design (citation needed) was the Monome (https://monome.org/) that looks like it is also still around and it has (always had?) some kind of open source license (https://github.com/monome).
Well, people can die if they have too many or too little of neighbors, but they can't be summoned from a thin air if they have just enough neighbors. Hard to simulate life with people. Though if you are ready for a simulation step of 20 years or so... But it still may not work, because you need people of two opposing sexes and compatible genders near the empty sell to fill it. In Game of Life all cells are hermaphrodites.
I like the way you think.
"I needed to replace 18 lightbulbs in my chandelier. Turns out 18 times any number is a lot. In cash"
I'm sure there are an abundant source of 'How I hustled a thumpawangy into $1000 a month in subscriptions" written by AI, but I doubt I could perceive a loss in that compared to the ones we had before.
You could also 4x the resolution by using half- and quarter-block characters from the top half of the ASCII table (or it'd be the PETSCII one i C64 case).
Exactly. It's even how I taught myself extremely basic Pascal -- getting my BASIC Life program running in Pascal. With asterisks.
A taught a friend at uni, who was a much better programmer than me, how the algorithm worked. He did a pixel-by-pixel version in machine code, but it was a bit slow on a ZX Spectrum.
So he did exactly the quarter-character-cell version you describe. I wrote the editor in BASIC, and he wrote a machine-code routine that kicked in when told and ran the generations. For extra fun he emitted some of the intermediate state to the border, so the border flashed stripes of colour as it calculated, so you could see it "thinking". Handy for static patterns -- you could see it hadn't crashed.
I've been considering doing a quarter-cell Mandelbrot for about 30Y now. Never got round to it yet.
A grid of capacitive touch sensors could be printed directly on the pcb, bringing down costs by a degree of magnitude. Real switches are much more satisfying though.
https://www.rogerlinndesign.com/linnstrument
One window = one pixel.
Did that a few years back, i guess this might still be possible
Looks like they are still around? https://novationmusic.com/launchpad
Also seems to be in stock locally.
The device that I think popularized that design (citation needed) was the Monome (https://monome.org/) that looks like it is also still around and it has (always had?) some kind of open source license (https://github.com/monome).
Now that would be simulating life witg life.
But I agree mistakes might be fun to watch.
fake edit: yes, kind of: https://www.eurobricks.com/forum/forums/topic/164622-moc-mec...
https://latedev.wordpress.com/2011/06/25/a-poker-chip-comput...