Winter Hobbies

During the good weather, I enjoy riding my bike a bit with my free time, but in the winter I am often de-motivated. That makes it a good time to focus on one of my other hobbies: electronics. I had a pretty fruitful weekend (so far!) on the electronics front. For Christmas, I had bought Tyler a “Game of Life” kit. This isn’t the board game you are likely thinking of, but rather a one (or zero, depending on how you look at it!) player computer simulation of a colony of organisms. A grid of cells is represented by LEDs, and their death or birth is dependent on the level of crowding in their neighborhood. Tyler did a great job soldering the kit together, I think we counted over 100 connections had to be soldered! Certainly, the most challenging project he’s put together thus far.

Trouble is, although you can connect multiple boards together (very clever!), they do cost $$ and a single board ends up with very fleeting generations. I thought to myself, “Well, since this is a board with a software programmed micro-controller, I ought to be able to change the delay between generations!

That idea ended up causing me a lot of work (and/or expense…). First, I had to build the AVR programmer kit that I’d bought previously, figure out how to install a driver for it (on my Win64 system), install all the AVR dev tools, solder a programming header on the board, figure out just enough to be dangerous, mod the code, and upload the new firmware.

Happily, this all worked pretty well! Except for the final step. It should be obvious, but I can’t figure out where the delay between generations comes from, ultimately. But, in preparation, I did all the rest of the above, along with re-building the current firmware, and just reloading that.

I’ve posted a question or two in the Adafruit forums on where the delay might be coming from, so hopefully someone will help me out there.