ECE 5760: Wireworld and Conway's Game of Life

By Aidan McNay and Thomas Figura

Introduction

For our final project for ECE 5760, we decided to implement Wireworld and Conway's Game of Life entirely on the DE1-SoC FPGA. Both Wireworld and Conway's Game of life are cellular automata, meaning that the "world" consistes of a grid of cells that continuously update their state depending on the current state of the cell and it's neighbors. Users are able to modify state through a PS2 Mouse that interfaces directly with the FPGA (clicking on the cell who's state they want to modify). In addition, we developed a command-line utility that allows the entire state to update according to the automata's rules, as well as allowing the user to save the entire state to a file, or load previously-saved states.

Demo