I've always wanted something like this board, buttons which can light up (preferably a few colours), to use to make games. Anyone ever found such a board which is hackable / programmable?
rmnclmnt•Mar 19, 2026
Novation Launchpad used to be exactly that: you send MIDI CC messages with proper values and you can light up the grid (with different colors).
Did that a few years back, i guess this might still be possible
The device that I think popularized that design (citation needed) was the Monome (https://monome.org/) that looks like it is also still around and it has (always had?) some kind of open source license (https://github.com/monome).
rmnclmnt•Mar 19, 2026
Thanks for the heads up! I have been out of this loop for quite a while, glad to see it's still there!
Yes Monome was this initial inspiration then followed by many, but it was way more expensive and niche IIRC
Aliexpress has a lot of cheap "smart gomoku board" now, they are cheap rgb-lighted membrane button grids O(13x13) with firmware playing games like Go, Reversi etc. (https://he.aliexpress.com/item/1005010089221164.html, https://he.aliexpress.com/item/1005011840606955.html ...). These proved to be surprisingly fun with children, the tactile interface is neat, and they're a good middle ground that helps learn the rules of games (has 1-on-1 modes + solo against several levels of "AI") but not as brain-rot distracting like a tablet.
I haven't tried reverse-engineering one yet, I hope at least some of these are hackable? Conway's life would certainly be one fun use, but custom games are totally something I'd want to make too!
Are these actually membrane or are there some switches there? I assume membrane, if only based on the dirt-cheap price. Anyway in combination with lighting up + sound the feedback feels immersive enough, it's definitely more fun than poking a tablet.
galaxyLogic•Mar 19, 2026
I wonder is there a version GoL where every bit on a computer-display or LCD TV is one cell? How does it look?
alex_duf•Mar 19, 2026
Do you mean every pixel or every sub-pixel?
Sub-pixel is interesting because the geometry of the grid isn't going to be the same from one screen to the other. It might also look compressed horizontally.
eps•Mar 19, 2026
Conversely, it'd be cool to play it on an large empty office building.
Right but what if every window was an outward pointing LCD screen each having their own node-per-pixel GoL !:_)
akkartik•Mar 19, 2026
How many bits per pixel are you assuming, and are you imagining the red pixels are vertical neighbors with corresponding red pixels above and below, etc.?
At 8 bpp the effect is only colors moving vertically, up and down. After a while digging into it I realize why: most colors are too dark to be visible, we only see the most significant bits in each channel. And when those bits influence left or right the consequences are not visible.
Maybe I should try 2bpp. Or some HSL where I can clamp L.
Edit: Oh yes, it's interesting at 2bpp!
dekhn•Mar 19, 2026
I did something like this: a 64x64 (4K) display of GoL (among other things) using addressable pixels. Alas, I only took one video when the display was working and it wasn't fully cleaned up: https://photos.app.goo.gl/WUmVgBVVi6rXDqSB7
slow_typist•Mar 19, 2026
Très cool.
A grid of capacitive touch sensors could be printed directly on the pcb, bringing down costs by a degree of magnitude. Real switches are much more satisfying though.
f1shy•Mar 19, 2026
I want to do a game like lights out. I'm thinking in 3d printing transparent caps and using dirt chip pcb switches and standard leds. The cost must be also down to 30 cts. Would be like a middle ground.
exolab•Mar 19, 2026
> I figured out what would be a reasonable amount to spend on the project and then multiplied that by 10.
I like the way you think.
alexpotato•Mar 19, 2026
Jeff Atwood has a great quote:
"I needed to replace 18 lightbulbs in my chandelier. Turns out 18 times any number is a lot. In cash"
self_awareness•Mar 19, 2026
That's not a "physical" version of game of life -- that's a digital version, like every version, but with bigger pixels.
gspr•Mar 19, 2026
I think "physical" refers to the fact that you initialize the state by pressing physical buttons. That's quite accurate.
Cthulhu_•Mar 19, 2026
Does make me wonder if it's possible to make a physical / analog / mechanical version of Game of Life.
I saw one in a computer museum in Switzerland. It was a much larger field, it was just large orange LEDs (or were they tubes?), but it also cycled between a dozen of different cell automata games. Something about being able to see individual "pixels" made it really mesmerizing.
mastermedo•Mar 19, 2026
A thousand bucks for 17x17 touchscreen. Add a painting frame, hang it on the wall, and you made yourself amazing art for cheap.
cjfd•Mar 19, 2026
When I was a teenager, I read a book about assembly language for the commodore and implemented the game of life in a really simple way. I just used the text screen. To switch on a cell, I would put an asterisk ('*') in it. Then I could run my machine code program and it would evolve according to the rules of the game of life.
abcd_f•Mar 19, 2026
And who didn't do that! :)
You could also 4x the resolution by using half- and quarter-block characters from the top half of the ASCII table (or it'd be the PETSCII one i C64 case).
lproven•Mar 19, 2026
> And who didn't do that! :)
Exactly. It's even how I taught myself extremely basic Pascal -- getting my BASIC Life program running in Pascal. With asterisks.
A taught a friend at uni, who was a much better programmer than me, how the algorithm worked. He did a pixel-by-pixel version in machine code, but it was a bit slow on a ZX Spectrum.
So he did exactly the quarter-character-cell version you describe. I wrote the editor in BASIC, and he wrote a machine-code routine that kicked in when told and ran the generations. For extra fun he emitted some of the intermediate state to the border, so the border flashed stripes of colour as it calculated, so you could see it "thinking". Handy for static patterns -- you could see it hadn't crashed.
I've been considering doing a quarter-cell Mandelbrot for about 30Y now. Never got round to it yet.
jerf•Mar 19, 2026
The answer to a lot of "wow, how did the 8-bit machine pull that off? it seems like that would eat a lot of RAM" is that the framebuffer is the data storage. You were literally looking at the primary data store itself, because when a full-resolution framebuffer was 1/4th your addressable RAM (and slightly more than that for your actual RAM since you couldn't ever quite use all 64KB no matter how you mapped it), you need to get the most bang for the buck out of that RAM usage as you can.
tempaccount5050•Mar 19, 2026
Ha, I remember doing this with my Apple //. I forget what I was doing, but realized if I could set a pixel and later get what color was drawn at that location I could use it as a big array. Didn't know about peek/poke yet. One of those core "computers are magic" memories.
alnwlsn•Mar 19, 2026
When I got into retrocomputing a few years ago, I also did this. Works great with TRS-80 semigraphic characters. First, I wrote it in C with a Z80 c compiler. The, I wrote it again in assembly and it was much faster! Amazing!
mkirsten•Mar 19, 2026
It is beautiful
Cthulhu_•Mar 19, 2026
I love this and would love to see it on a wall at our office or something like that. Maybe there's smaller/cheaper led/switches that would work in a handheld version.
Traubenfuchs•Mar 19, 2026
Would be interesting to do this with people and observe the inevitable mistakes they make.
Now that would be simulating life witg life.
ordu•Mar 19, 2026
Well, people can die if they have too many or too little of neighbors, but they can't be summoned from a thin air if they have just enough neighbors. Hard to simulate life with people. Though if you are ready for a simulation step of 20 years or so... But it still may not work, because you need people of two opposing sexes and compatible genders near the empty sell to fill it. In Game of Life all cells are hermaphrodites.
But I agree mistakes might be fun to watch.
mittermayr•Mar 19, 2026
Totally off-topic, and I may be wrong, but I immediately loved the non-LLM writing-style and felt glued to the content just through the writing alone. It's getting rare.
zytek•Mar 19, 2026
lcamtuf is doing that for decades!
tmountain•Mar 19, 2026
Personally, I can barely stomach reading LLM writing. I find myself closing lots of articles after a sentence or two. I wonder how this plays out longer-term regarding engagement.
jerf•Mar 19, 2026
In probably another year or two I expect the metrics will show that it is a positive turn off. Unfortunately we're on the cutting edge of this particular movement and there's still a lot more "value" to be "extracted" from the general public before they all get wise to it too.
The next problem we'll face after that, with the 1-2 years newer AIs of the time, is that the default LLM voice is just a particular affectation created by the training, not "the voice of LLMs" or anything. It's trivial to kick them into a different style. I just used AI to do some architecture design documents this week, and prompted it to first look at about 1-2k words that I wrote myself all organically for the style. The good news is the resulting documents almost, but admittedly, not quite entirely, lack that LLM style. They're still prone to more bullet lists than I use directly; then again, in this context they were fairly appropriate, so I'm not too triggered by the result.
The bad news is, that's all it takes to make AI writing that isn't in that default tone. It's not that hard. Students cheating on essays have already figured it out, the spammers really can't be that far behind. Probably more stuff than we realize is already AI output, it's just the stragglers and those who don't really care (which I imagine is a lot of spammers, after all) who are still failing to tweak the style. They'll catch up as soon as engagement falls off.
fwipsy•Mar 19, 2026
I think HN readers are the leading edge of the technology literate. Might take longer than you think for the general public to start noticing "AI voice."
Lerc•Mar 19, 2026
I have not felt that it was becoming rare. Certainly on platforms like YouTube you can see automated processes cranking blandness at scale. I haven't found it encroaching on the topics that interest me like toy electronic projects, how some ancient game rendered its Sprites, colour space analysis, or a compiler that fits in a tweet,
I'm sure there are an abundant source of 'How I hustled a thumpawangy into $1000 a month in subscriptions" written by AI, but I doubt I could perceive a loss in that compared to the ones we had before.
fwipsy•Mar 19, 2026
Do you have a link? Been looking to switch thumpawangy vendors.
possiblydrunk•Mar 19, 2026
Nicely done! Scale matters. If you make something big enough relative to its expected size, it will impress and captivate, even if it's simple. General observation, not that the construction here was by any means simple.
lproven•Mar 19, 2026
This is fantastic, but there's no way I am taking the time to build one, and the cost is a little frightening...
rojoroboto•Mar 19, 2026
I bet that the author would really get a kick out of the T2 Tile Project.
MrGilbert•Mar 19, 2026
I wonder if going for keyboard switches with RGB could bring the price down, if you then either print the keycaps yourself, our use a 3d printing service. 23 Cherry MX switches cost 20€, that‘s roughly 260€ for a 17x17 matrix.
waterproof•Mar 19, 2026
Should be doable to implement GoL on an ortholinear RGB keyboard using QMK
MrGilbert•Mar 19, 2026
I mean - that sounds like an awesome project in itself!
kangalioo•Mar 19, 2026
A much cheaper way might have been to buy a couple of Novation Launchpads. 8x8 full RGB tactile buttons for 90€, MIDI-controllable. Four of those next to another for 16x16 at 360€ plus a little bit for cables and controller comes out at 1/3 the price
layer8•Mar 19, 2026
It would be larger (even with the mini), you’d have gaps between the four, and also the four middle buttons in each part have their corners clipped.
Looking at teardown images of the launchpad pcb, it might be possible to shave down the ground plane on the two non-button sides enough that you could mate them up with no bezel interfering.
Re: illuminated tact’s: Old launchpads go for $25 - $30 on ebay, and you don’t have to purchase your own control and power components…
layer8•Mar 19, 2026
The size and button shape concerns would remain.
jFriedensreich•Mar 19, 2026
how is this real life more than a monitor, its just bigger pixels. i was expecting programmable live cells or something mechanical
waterproof•Mar 19, 2026
Check out the video - you can draw on the game by pressing the switches.
smcameron•Mar 19, 2026
Something like those switches might be made very cheaply with a 3D printer, possibly a laser cutter, some transparent or semitransparent acrylic sheet, tactile switches and some LEDs. I designed a cheapo replacement for $50 tellite switches and got the price down to about $0.60 Not quite the same, as these are a lot bigger, and getting things down to the desired size might be troublesome. Anyway, here's a little video of my fake cheapo tellite switches: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaenrgPVCjc
zuiko_39182•Mar 19, 2026
this matches my experience exactly
Tepix•Mar 19, 2026
Lovely project indeed. If you want to build your own: I found a whole bunch of much cheaper illuminated switches on AliExpress within minutes.
Nevermark•Mar 19, 2026
This is fantastic.
I happen to own a physical pong table. Everyone loves it. [0] There is something magical about material and only-does-one-thing instantiations of digital things.
——
I am really looking forward to a flat table top screen consisting of millions of magnetically-controlled vertical-extruding rod pixels, with actual color controlled pixels along their length. For an amazing table display/extrusion of D&D dungeons and terrain, for miniatures.
A little sensor ability, and when the extrusion "scrolls" laterally, it could create little lips that move the miniatures too, so they stay "in place". And move NPCs around at the DMs direction. Now turn of the room lights, and use the light pixels not just for color, but for lighting effects like wall lamps flickering, add spooky position-distributed sounds...
That has to be coming soon, right?
Some part of me wants to describe it Claude, iterate, and say "Now polish that design, economically optimize the parts, link in the supply chain, and ship me the first review unit." That has to be coming soon, right?
The lines separating planes of reality, they are a blurring, quickly.
And optimize for repair when one of the thousands of actuators gets stuck or burns out…
Here’s a thought, though: you’ve seen the sand table + kinect projection mapping demo? What about that, plus a two-axis moving magnet sand mandala marble drawing table? The actuator could draw the path /sculpt the terrain, then release the marble and grab the figurines?
Nevermark•Mar 19, 2026
Thanks. I had not seen that. It is definitely the poor mans software controlled physical reality I am looking for! :)
Yeah, that would provide a much richer environment for table top role play games. And allow for telepresence meet ups.
sleepybrett•Mar 19, 2026
the trick it to be able to actuate the rods without placing a linear actuator on every one, but it's a complicated problem. Magnetism? hydraulic shafts fed and drained by a series of gates making a matrix? acoustic levitation?
I'm reminded of the old BERG London pixel track display that used a little cart with a vertical array of solenoids that would travel the length of the display flipping each individual pixel on an off physically. https://www.designboom.com/technology/pixel-track-berg-cloud... It's on my list of'next time i'm unemployed' projects to pick up and open source a design for.
mvrckhckr•Mar 19, 2026
Great idea and execution. I like your thinking.
meindnoch•Mar 19, 2026
Eh. I thought they had somehow created a physical realization of Conway's Game of Life.
alexb_•Mar 19, 2026
This isn't what this is about, but I wonder if anyone has created a fully mechanized version of Conway's Game of Life. The fact that you only have to follow 4 rules, and each cell only needs to observe its neighbors to follow those rules, makes me wonder if it's possible to track these things mechanically. I unfortunately don't know enough about mechanical engineering to do such a thing.
kanapala•Mar 19, 2026
Technology Will Save Us, from a brighter past, produced the Arcade Coder as their swan song. It had 12×12 tactile buttons with color leds inside, a companion app to program it with scratch like code blocks, and interactive tutorials. It's ESP32 based.
There's an effort to continue it's life, ast the app was on the app store for a brief time. https://github.com/padraigfl/twsu-arcade-coder-esp32
satiated_grue•Mar 19, 2026
This would be something neat to do with a core memory array, just like this but bigger:
Wow, in switches alone this would cost me $1200! Which actually isn't that bad for a one off-like this with easily available components - I've seen worse. You can of course take your chances with Aliexpress Specials but be warned: some of those cheap switches are cheap switches (sometimes, they're barely even switches). And you won't be getting them inside of 2 weeks.
I think I would have tried mechanical keyboarding switches that can take an LED and a clear keycap. Not really the same effect, but you could probably have gotten out to 24x24 for the same price.
imglorp•Mar 19, 2026
Someone's senior project was an EEPROM based life in discrete logic and a bunch of LEDs. There was no CPU; the ROM served as a state machine. I wish I knew more about it now; I'm not sure how it latched state.
ge96•Mar 19, 2026
Damn around $900 just for the switches, I feel it, little project costing a lot but it's fun
In my case a $300 camera that produces worse photos than an old flagship $50 camera from eBay
sleepybrett•Mar 19, 2026
In the seatac airport there used to be a big 'life wall' they did their switches w/ capacitive metal disks
andysalmela34•Mar 19, 2026
well written but i disagree with the conclusion. the data supports multiple interpretations
Melraidin•Mar 19, 2026
> Can it be made for less?
Would you be able to use the LEDs as light sensors and eliminate the switch component entirely? Maybe a tubular shield over each LED so it doesn't interact with others around it then covering it with your finger could be read as toggling the state?
egypturnash•Mar 19, 2026
The rest of your hand is not transparent and will cover a lot of other buttons while you’re only trying to push one.
bawolff•Mar 19, 2026
> To bring the idea to life, I started with rigorous budgeting: I figured out what would be a reasonable amount to spend on the project and then multiplied that by 10.
Lol, this is the way to do hobbies
sleepybrett•Mar 19, 2026
It's not edge to edge, though maybe if you built your own silicon overlay you could make it edge to edge.. but adafruit sells these tileable pcbs and silicon overlays with capacitive buttons: https://www.adafruit.com/product/3954
38 Comments
https://www.rogerlinndesign.com/linnstrument
Did that a few years back, i guess this might still be possible
Looks like they are still around? https://novationmusic.com/launchpad
Also seems to be in stock locally.
The device that I think popularized that design (citation needed) was the Monome (https://monome.org/) that looks like it is also still around and it has (always had?) some kind of open source license (https://github.com/monome).
Yes Monome was this initial inspiration then followed by many, but it was way more expensive and niche IIRC
I had a fork of this at one point where I made GoL for it and had mapped the lit cells to a MIDI output.
https://github.com/mat1jaczyyy/lpp-performance-cfw
I haven't tried this yet, but there's also an open source grid-controller project.
https://github.com/203-Systems/MatrixOS
I haven't tried reverse-engineering one yet, I hope at least some of these are hackable? Conway's life would certainly be one fun use, but custom games are totally something I'd want to make too!
Are these actually membrane or are there some switches there? I assume membrane, if only based on the dirt-cheap price. Anyway in combination with lighting up + sound the feedback feels immersive enough, it's definitely more fun than poking a tablet.
One window = one pixel.
Should be easy to do on my phone: https://itch.io/post/15723528
Maybe I should try 2bpp. Or some HSL where I can clamp L.
Edit: Oh yes, it's interesting at 2bpp!
A grid of capacitive touch sensors could be printed directly on the pcb, bringing down costs by a degree of magnitude. Real switches are much more satisfying though.
I like the way you think.
"I needed to replace 18 lightbulbs in my chandelier. Turns out 18 times any number is a lot. In cash"
fake edit: yes, kind of: https://www.eurobricks.com/forum/forums/topic/164622-moc-mec...
https://latedev.wordpress.com/2011/06/25/a-poker-chip-comput...
You could also 4x the resolution by using half- and quarter-block characters from the top half of the ASCII table (or it'd be the PETSCII one i C64 case).
Exactly. It's even how I taught myself extremely basic Pascal -- getting my BASIC Life program running in Pascal. With asterisks.
A taught a friend at uni, who was a much better programmer than me, how the algorithm worked. He did a pixel-by-pixel version in machine code, but it was a bit slow on a ZX Spectrum.
So he did exactly the quarter-character-cell version you describe. I wrote the editor in BASIC, and he wrote a machine-code routine that kicked in when told and ran the generations. For extra fun he emitted some of the intermediate state to the border, so the border flashed stripes of colour as it calculated, so you could see it "thinking". Handy for static patterns -- you could see it hadn't crashed.
I've been considering doing a quarter-cell Mandelbrot for about 30Y now. Never got round to it yet.
Now that would be simulating life witg life.
But I agree mistakes might be fun to watch.
The next problem we'll face after that, with the 1-2 years newer AIs of the time, is that the default LLM voice is just a particular affectation created by the training, not "the voice of LLMs" or anything. It's trivial to kick them into a different style. I just used AI to do some architecture design documents this week, and prompted it to first look at about 1-2k words that I wrote myself all organically for the style. The good news is the resulting documents almost, but admittedly, not quite entirely, lack that LLM style. They're still prone to more bullet lists than I use directly; then again, in this context they were fairly appropriate, so I'm not too triggered by the result.
The bad news is, that's all it takes to make AI writing that isn't in that default tone. It's not that hard. Students cheating on essays have already figured it out, the spammers really can't be that far behind. Probably more stuff than we realize is already AI output, it's just the stragglers and those who don't really care (which I imagine is a lot of spammers, after all) who are still failing to tweak the style. They'll catch up as soon as engagement falls off.
I'm sure there are an abundant source of 'How I hustled a thumpawangy into $1000 a month in subscriptions" written by AI, but I doubt I could perceive a loss in that compared to the ones we had before.
But you can get illuminated buttons for less money: https://www.ebay.com/itm/173922115935
Re: illuminated tact’s: Old launchpads go for $25 - $30 on ebay, and you don’t have to purchase your own control and power components…
I happen to own a physical pong table. Everyone loves it. [0] There is something magical about material and only-does-one-thing instantiations of digital things.
——
I am really looking forward to a flat table top screen consisting of millions of magnetically-controlled vertical-extruding rod pixels, with actual color controlled pixels along their length. For an amazing table display/extrusion of D&D dungeons and terrain, for miniatures.
A little sensor ability, and when the extrusion "scrolls" laterally, it could create little lips that move the miniatures too, so they stay "in place". And move NPCs around at the DMs direction. Now turn of the room lights, and use the light pixels not just for color, but for lighting effects like wall lamps flickering, add spooky position-distributed sounds...
That has to be coming soon, right?
Some part of me wants to describe it Claude, iterate, and say "Now polish that design, economically optimize the parts, link in the supply chain, and ship me the first review unit." That has to be coming soon, right?
The lines separating planes of reality, they are a blurring, quickly.
——
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84Ymt9BAq5s
Here’s a thought, though: you’ve seen the sand table + kinect projection mapping demo? What about that, plus a two-axis moving magnet sand mandala marble drawing table? The actuator could draw the path /sculpt the terrain, then release the marble and grab the figurines?
Yeah, that would provide a much richer environment for table top role play games. And allow for telepresence meet ups.
I'm reminded of the old BERG London pixel track display that used a little cart with a vertical array of solenoids that would travel the length of the display flipping each individual pixel on an off physically. https://www.designboom.com/technology/pixel-track-berg-cloud... It's on my list of'next time i'm unemployed' projects to pick up and open source a design for.
https://www.core64.io/
I think I would have tried mechanical keyboarding switches that can take an LED and a clear keycap. Not really the same effect, but you could probably have gotten out to 24x24 for the same price.
In my case a $300 camera that produces worse photos than an old flagship $50 camera from eBay
Would you be able to use the LEDs as light sensors and eliminate the switch component entirely? Maybe a tubular shield over each LED so it doesn't interact with others around it then covering it with your finger could be read as toggling the state?
Lol, this is the way to do hobbies