Game of Life on a Raspberry Pi (and a LED board)… in Haskell

This is a quick post about, re-purposing my Raspberry Pi + Peggy2 art installation, which already re-purposes a 8-9 years old Peggy2 LED board, to play Conway’s Game of Life.

Electronic Art

 

I had been wanting to do this for such a long time…

Peggy 2.2 LED pegboard

1hour and plenty of tinkering around the board…

When I press on the U4, all of a sudden the whole 1st row lights up…

But then it becomes very dim and FLASHES…. luckily I remembered what I read yesterday on the forum: to short L1 or L2… and it WORKS !!!

So to summarise there seem to be 2 problems, hiding each other:

1) the U4 has a connection problem. I don’t know exactly what, I’ll try to re-solder it, but when I press on one of the corners it works properly…

2) L2 that I installed seems to be causing very dim lights and flashing… just shorting L1 (as per the forum’s instructions) seems to fix it

Finally….

Now thanks to some (very) helpful and quick reply from one of the “gurus” at EvilMadScientist, I’ve started testing the U4, one of the 2 STP16DP05 LED drivers.

I switched it with U5 but the symptoms remained exactly the same.

I’ve checked the pins of the circuit and, with an OhmMeter, the connection between the front and the back, for every single one of the 24 pins…