Electronics > Projects, Designs, and Technical Stuff

Analogue Game of Life

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Slh:
An analogue game of life that I designed around Easter (in peak lock down).

It's got a discrete window comparator with a biggish capacitor (C202) and associated resistors to give a delay of a few hundred milliseconds. Each cell is an individual PCB with connectors alternately on the top and the bottom so that they tessellate nicely. Each neighbouring cell pulls down the corresponding resistor on RN101 and RN102 so that the input to the the comparator is a harmonic progression if you ignore the diodes (1, 1/2, 1/3, 1/4 etc). The two long tailed pairs have different references and one of them has feedback from the cell's own state to enable 3 neighbours to turn it on but only 2 to keep it alive.

The diagonal neighbours are fed around in a clockwise direction. I messed this up the first time so all the boards have bodge wires on the back to correct it.

It works fairly well although the unclocked analogue nature of it does mean that there is potentially some interesting race conditions and they don't all switch at exactly the same time. I've only built 9 so far and each has taken roughly 4 hours to build (because they're tiny and my soldering is not great on the SC-70-6 packages) so I'm not sure if I'll make the grid any bigger.

Slh:
A picture of the back to show the dodgy soldering...

MK14:
Interesting/fun idea, but..

I'm confused by your schematic. It seems to show some of the PNP transistors, apparently connected the wrong way round.
I.e. The Emitter (obviously that would apply to the base and collectors, as well, in the respective polarities) is connected towards ground (rather than towards the positive side).
Q102B, Q101B, and maybe more.
There are very rare configurations, which are not normally used, whereby you use transistors like that. But I presume, that is not the case here (also, it would tend towards being a datasheet violation, as you would be risking reverse biasing the EB junction too much).

Slh:
That's a good point and actually me screwing up and using a PNP symbol when it should have been npn... Since I put it upside down and I knew it was npn I didn't notice that it wasn't... I was being lazy with making parts in kicad when I threw it together.

There's only one PNP, all the others are NPNs in a dual package.

MK14:

--- Quote from: Slh on September 05, 2020, 05:45:06 pm ---That's a good point and actually me screwing up and using a PNP symbol when it should have been npn... Since I put it upside down and I knew it was npn I didn't notice that it wasn't... I was being lazy with making parts in kicad when I threw it together.

There's only one PNP, all the others are NPNs in a dual package.

--- End quote ---

That makes sense. I went by what I saw on the schematic.

Doing the game of life in analogue form, is a neat idea!

When I came across the title, I thought and assumed, you would be using arrays of op-amps. So, even better, an all discrete component solution.   :)

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