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With the Covid-19 pandemic ongoing it is not likely there will be any further Breadboard Games events this year. There was a small event in early March in Kevin St. public library with children from Singe Street primary school. On that day the attendees built a board very similar to the one we used in
St. Audoen’s school in 2017.

So what about the rest of the year? Well, a couple of events happened this year that made me think of a particular game: the passing of John Horton Conway and the pandemic and that game is of course “The game of life”. Lots has been written about this game and I will not repeat that here, instead I will focus on how this can be implemented using a low cost microcontroller (MCU), screen and breadboard. There will likely not be “event” based on this game but maybe a reader will be inspired to try it out for themselves.

This circuits makes use of components I had lying left over from other breadboard games projects. The MCU is the 30 cent (approx) STM32F030F4P6. This display is a 176×220 TFT board with a parallel interface. The databus runs between PA0-PA7 on the STM32 and DB0-DB7 on the display (it is not shown completely as it would have cluttered the schematic).
The specifications of the MCU are pretty meagre: 16kB of Flash, 4kB of RAM, 48MHz clock speed. All pins have been used to control the display.”

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