March 23, 2026
Drama dial set to MAX
Conway's Game of Life, in real life
A glowing Life board sparks wallet jokes, fire fears, and glider wars
TLDR: A DIYer built a real-life, light-up Game of Life board with pricey buttons and a speed knob, and it dazzled the internet. Commenters split between praising the art and warning about cost and current, with jokes about “college savings,” “toaster LEDs,” and endless glider debates keeping the thread buzzing.
A maker built a wooden, glowing 17×17 grid of clicky buttons that runs Conway’s Game of Life—cells “live” or “die” by simple rules—and the internet lost it. The creator joked about multiplying the budget by ten and raiding “college savings,” and the comments doubled down with parental guilt memes and “my 401(k) just died of overpopulation” quips. Over on HN, the strongest split is art vs. overkill: one side swoons over the craftsmanship and the “just for fun” energy; the other calls it a wallet-wrecker that could’ve been done cheaper with driver chips.
Then came the safety wars: the board rapidly blinks rows of LEDs and pushes short bursts of high current. Cue the “150 mA per LED? It’s a space heater!” vs. “Average current is fine, calm down” showdown. Keyboard folks piled in to declare it a “$2K keyboard without letters,” while hardware purists nitpicked the microcontroller and demanded different parts.
Meanwhile, jokers loved the knob that changes speed (“the drama dial!”) and the firmware’s watchdog (“tiny dog that reboots the lights”). Classic nerd culture kicked in with glider debates—too small for epic patterns?—and someone inevitably shouted “use an ESP32.” Love it or side-eye it, the community can’t look away.
Key Points
- •A 17×17 grid of NKK JB15LPF-JF LED pushbutton switches implements a physical Conway’s Game of Life.
- •A Microchip AVR128DA64 MCU drives the matrix via row/column multiplexing using 17 row and 17 column GPIO lines.
- •Because each row’s duty cycle is ~6%, LEDs are pulsed at about 150 mA through 20 Ω resistors from 5 V; a full row can draw up to 2.5 A.
- •Row and column currents are switched with DMN2056U (n‑channel) and DMG2301L (p‑channel) MOSFETs; the MCU scans switch inputs with internal pull‑ups.
- •Firmware decouples display refresh from game logic, updates during a blackout window, and uses a watchdog timer (~15 ms) for safety; speed is analog‑controlled (0–~10 Hz) and inputs pause evaluation for 2 seconds.