Tony Goodhew got in touch and told me about Steve Baines’ effort to get the famous Conway’s Game of Life running on the Raspberry Pi Pico with a Pimoroni Pico Unicorn Pack attached. You can see Steve’s original script on the Pimoroni forums here. You can also read about Tony’s port of the same code to work on the Pico Explorer screen in the same place.

Not having a Pico Unicorn to hand, I wondered if it would work on a Pimoroni Pico Scroll Pack – and indeed it did, with some minor modifications to Steve’s code. You can see that code on a GitHub Gist here.

To get it to run, load the Pimoroni MicroPython UF2 onto your Raspberry Pi Pico, then use Thonny to put the code onto your Pico, calling it main.py. Make sure you’re not in REPL mode in Thonny, and the code should just run. The A button on the Scroll Pack resets the game and starts it going again.

A demo video of a couple of runs can be seen below: