My 2018 new year’s resolution was to learn difficult things.

I wanted to focus on learning things that are difficult to learn, push myself toward more facility with complex math and computer science. I’ve been spending a lot of time bashing my head against robotics, machine learning, and computer vision. It has been worthwhile and interesting. And hard.

But I needed a break. I wanted to learn something easy. Easy things are fun to learn, there is so much immediate progress. And, of course, easy for me is not easy for everyone. Arduino was easy for me but crocheting has not been (yes, I know you found it trivial and all I need to do is this than that then this again but, hey, look! An Arduino!).

I wanted to do something that didn’t involve brain-bending linear algebra, calculus, and 3D trigonometry. My husband (and Fitbit employee) Chris suggested I make a watch face for the Fitbit Versa that I stole from his work desk. I envisioned a jellyfish that lived on my wrist, softly drifting up (away from gravity). Perhaps my step count could influence the size (or number?) of the jellyfish.

He suggested something simpler. I decided that I’d have the time appear and then run Conway’s Game of Life on the pixels.

I went to dev.fitbit.com and logged in with Fitbit user credentials. They had examples, none of which were quite relevant but they were nice enough. I clicked over to Fitbit Studio, their development system, a web-based IDE. It had me create a new project, giving examples to start with. I based my new project on a clock face. I immediately wanted to see if it would run so I had to follow the steps in the Getting Started Guide. (Ok, Chris helped me through this but the guide actually gives you the steps in order.)

It was pretty fast to set up, easy to change background colors and plenty of examples. But then I wanted to read the pixels set by the time. Sadly, if that is possible, we couldn’t figure it out (Chris says it is not possible).

Giving up on the insurmountable problem, I went on to the next one. I wanted Conway’s Game of Life to run so I reviewed a few online versions written in JavaScript and found one that I liked from Andreas Kristiansen in Denmark. Since I could edit the code on the page, I played with it and verified I could understand and modify it.