![]() ![]() ![]() Needing a project to keep him occupied, he decided to upgrade his 90s Casio CFX-9850G calculator to run custom machine code.Īll really wanted was for his vintage calculator to understand Reverse Polish Notation (RPN). recently found himself stung by the burden of free time while in lockdown. If you want to learn a little more about these displays, check out this love letter to the VFD.Ĭontinue reading “This Retro Game Console Puts Vacuum Fluorescent Display To Good Use” → Posted in Arduino Hacks, classic hacks Tagged conways game of life, game console, noritake, snake, vacuum fluorescent display, vfd We really like the look of this console, and we appreciate putting an otherwise obsolete display to use in a creative way. We’d imagine Pong would be a good choice too, as well as perhaps Tetris if the display were flipped on its side. chose appropriately blocky games for the console, like Snake, Conway’s Game of Life, and the venerable snow demo. To celebrate the retro look of the VFD, both cases are decked out with woodgrain side panels. The display case connects to the controller with a ribbon cable and holds the VFD power supply and driver. The controller holds the Arduino Nano and all the controls, plus a piezo buzzer for fun. chose a two-piece design for his console, with a separate controller and display. Turning on either set of segments yields one of the two base colors, while turning on both yields a sorta-kinda whitish color, if you squint a bit. Each pixel is composed of six short linear segments, with alternating red and blue colors. The Noritake Itron GU20X8-301 VFD is a “tricolor” display with eight rows of 20 rectangular pixels. In a lot of ways, the design of ’s Arduino-based VFD console is driven by his choice of display. So when we see something like a VFD game console, we just have to sit up and take notice. But this is Hackaday, and we don’t really pay much attention to what we’re supposed to do, but rather to what’s fun and cool to do. ![]() Small in size, low-resolution, blocky segments, and a limited color palette - all characteristics of the typical vacuum fluorescent display, any of which would seem to disqualify them as the display of choice for a lot of applications. ![]() Posted in Misc Hacks Tagged conways game of life, ESP32, ESP32 ULP, game of life, solar cell If it’s speed you care about however, you’re better off implementing Life in an FPGA. We’ve seen a similar approach in a “solar creature” that runs a Life-life simulation on a seven-segment LCD. ’s interesting idea of changing Life‘s activity based on the amount of energy available turns the Game into something resembling a cold-blooded animal. In bright sunlight this happens every few seconds, while on an overcast day it could take minutes or even hours. When the voltage reaches 3.3 V, the main CPU wakes up and computes the Game’s new state. The Ultra Low Power (ULP) co-processor, meanwhile, keeps an eye on the lithium battery’s voltage as it’s slowly being charged by the solar cell. The display is extremely power-efficient by its very nature the ESP’s main processor core, on the other hand, is deliberately placed into deep sleep mode most of the time to save as much power as possible. The system is therefore highly active in full sunlight, and grinds almost to a complete halt at night.Īn ESP32 runs the simulation and outputs the result to a 400 x 300 pixel e-ink display. The game runs off a solar cell that charges a battery, with the battery’s voltage determining how long it takes to advance the game by one generation. The basic idea is that the speed at which ’s Game of Life evolves is governed by the amount of ambient light. It’s easy to add features to make it a bit more life-like, however, as has done by giving the Conway’s creation something of a circadian rhythm. But while it uses biological terminology such as “cells”, “alive” and “generation”, the basic game is too simplistic to be a model for any real-world biological process. Conway’s Game of Life is a beautiful example of how complex behavior can emerge from a few very simple rules. ![]()
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