LifeBox – an ecosystem of LEDs with a Raspberry Pi

Ferran Fabregas flew over from Barcelona last weekend to attend the Southend Raspberry Jam. I was lucky enough to catch his talk on his project: the LifeBox. This is a cube approximately 35x35x35cm featuring an LED matrix panel on the front. A Raspberry Pi inside the box generates an ecosystem of two ‘pixelic’ entities – blue and yellow – along with their food, ‘mana’, which is white. The C code sets various parameters as to how the entities live, die and reproduce and then the resulting environmental array is displayed as LEDs on the panel. It is not Conway’s Game of Life – it’s more complex than that. The result is part art, part science and eminently blinky!

You can read more about the project, and see more pictures, via Ferran’s blog which includes the slides from his Southend presentation. You can see a video of it in action below:

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