Life is all about balancing. A life with plenty of workload is going to drive us crazy. Hence, we should find our own way to relax our tension, especially playing some exciting video game.

For those who interested on the video game, you must have a good look on this “Game of Life”. Actually, it’s a Zero-player game and also a great example of a cellular automation. Game of Life is a fascinating dashboard game, as it consist a grid of squares that extends infinitely in all directions.

Furthermore, each of the cells has eight surrounding cells and they are closing in each other, even in the end zone.

Technically, the cells have two different states, which as:

• Alive state,

• Dead state.

These two states are evolving over discrete time units. The status of all cells takes into account when calculating the state of negotiations at the next turn. By the way, all cells are updated frequently.

Those main components that being used in this project are a PIC12F683, a Nokia 3310 LCD and 2x QT100A. However, you must beware that it might didn’t have enough memory on the PIC. In this case, you have to break the screen with a grid and convert the 84×84 array of pixels in a 25×71 matrix form. [link to translated page]

Nokia 3310 LCD is still very popular among small embedded projects. It is low power (can run from a single CR2032 motherboard battery) and easy controlled Graphical LCD with 84×48 pixel resolution.

Hardware construction is based on another project (3310 temperature probe). You can get LCD setup source code here. Couldn’t find the game code of this project that would be interesting to see and even to try it. Anyway project is great for learning basic Nokia 3310 interfacing.

Nokia 3310 graphical display seems to be very popular among embedded hobbyists. Probably because of it’s availability, lots of examples over the internet and simplicity of interfacing. Wichit Sirichote has developed simple scope application by using his project 8051SBC board.

Interfacing of display is very simple as it uses serial interface. The only thing you should take care when using 5V logic is to reduce LCD voltage to 3V level. This can be simply done by using two general purpose diodes connected in series. This provides approximately 1.4V drop. Source code is available for your experiments. Also you can see live action of this simple scope in this video. Of course this scope can’t assure you proper characteristics but this example gives you great info about interfacing 3310 LCD.