pico-conway

Cellular automata on a pico...

Cells are colour-coded according to their age. Button A resets, B clears the screen, X adds a randomly-placed glider (this happens randomly without pressing anything). Y toggles screen brightness.

Pico2 allows for a 160x120 cell domain, memory restrictions mean the original Pico can only support 106x80.

build

hardware

Uses the Rasbperry Pi Pico or Pico2 with the Pimoroni pico-display-2

software

Requires pico-sdk and the pimoroni-pico](https://github.com/pimoroni/pimoroni-pico) libraries.

1. fork or clone this repo.

2. download and extract a release of the pico C/C++ SDK

3. download and extract a release of pimoroni-pico. This is needed for the graphics library and display driver.

4. download a cross-compiler e.g. g++-arm-none-eabi if necessary. Prebuilt riscv toolchains is available here

5. edit CMakeLists.txt so that PICO_SDK_PATH and PIMORONI_PATH point to the correct locations

6. build the image for the intended platform, optionally supplying the toolchain path (if not in $PATH), e.g.

   mkdir -p build
   cd build
   cmake -DPICO_PLATFORM=rp2350-riscv -DPICO_TOOLCHAIN_PATH=/opt/riscv-gcc-14 ..
   make -j
   

   Valid values for PICO_PLATORM are:

   • rp2040 (Cortex M0+)
   • rp2350 or rp2350-arm-s (Cortex M33+)
   • rp2350-riscv (Hazard 3)

7. copy image to device (connected with BOOTSEL pressed), e.g.

   cp pico-conway.uf2 /media/<username>/RPI-RP2
   

test

The algorithm itself can be tested/debugged on the host machine using the test harness, e.g.:

g++ -g -O0 -Wall -Werror --std=c++20 src/test_conway.cpp src/conway.cpp -o test