Arduino Life Clock II

Time, birthday reminders, and Conway's "Game of Life" in red, green, and orange. (Somewhat better video than the previous.)

Technical:
The bottom board contains the ATmega168 and a MAX756 step-up converter that takes as little as 1 AA battery and steps it up to the 5V used by the board.

The middle board is sort of a shield for the first. Most everything on it is accessed via I2C. It contains a DS1307 RTC (with b/u battery), a DS1621 temp sensor, and a 24LC256 256K EEPROM. It also contains a MAX3232 for serial I/O, and loading sketches to the board from the IDE. Finally, it contains a piezo and an IR receiver so that a Sony TV remote can be used for input.

The top board contains a pair of MAX7221s used drive the 2 color matrix. (see http://www.arduino.cc/playground/Main/MultiplexMAX72xx for details.)

Software:
Conways game of life was adapted from an example on processing.org and outputs through the LedControl library. It stops after a set number of generations or if the colony dies or goes into a single static pattern.

I wrote the marquee code to access the EEPROM for its 5x7 font set, and preset messages. The marquee and game can be run in red, green, and orange (red+green).

The case is cherry wood.

Category:

Howto & Style

Tags:

• Arduino
• Game
• of
• Life
• Scrolling
• Messages
• Marquee

[ChessPieceRook]

hey, can you send me the code for writing/reading the eeprom??

i've looked everywhere.....and nothing has really helped.... DX

[alucm]

Nifty! Are you going to offer a kit for sale?

[misssmitty]

Cool music, clock, and everything! That's a great unit! Better then all the other one's I have seen. That case is beautiful!