The Lights Keep on Blinken

cavac writes "At the 19th Chaos Communications Congress in Berlin/Germany developers showed their newest developments for the closed-down Blinkenlights-Project. One of the projects was the Blinkenlights Fileserver Project. Members of this team developed a protocol and some tools similar to ftp, which you can use to share Blinkenlights-Movies. Today, a first Beta-Version was released. You might want to check it out. (It also includes the famous Telnet-Blinkenlights-Player). We are still searching people willing to help us developing this software even more or to work with us on "Phase II": Implementing Soft- and Hardware for a Hardware-Based Blinkenlights Player. This will most likely based on one of Zilog's new Development Kits - the "Z8 Encore!"."

Comments

Was allready done long before

[MuppetsCmdr]

In november 1995, the ETV - student association of EE, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands - allready did a similar thing.
It's in Dutch, but there are some pictures.

The full Blinkenlights story

[buulu]

At the 19th Chaos Communications Congress in Berlin/Germany developers showed their newest developments for the closed-down Blinkenlights-Project

Celebrating its 20th anniversary the Chaos Computer Club has made a special present to itself and the city of Berlin. From September 12th, 2001 to February 23rd, 2002, the famous "Haus des Lehrers" (house of the teacher) office building at Berlin Alexanderplatz has been enhanced to become world's biggest interactive computer display: Blinkenlights (a term defined by the Jargon File). The upper eight floors of the building were transformed in to a huge display by arranging 144 lamps behind the building's front windows. A computer controlled each of the lamps independently to produce a monochrome matrix of 18 times 8 pixels. During the night, a constantly growing number of animations could be seen. But there was an interactive component as well: you were able to play the old arcade classic Pong on the building using your mobile phone and you could place your own loveletters on the screen as well. Blinkenlights was up and running at until February 23rd, 2002, running 23 weeks and 5 days in total. During that period, we constantly improved its feature set. Even now, work on Blinkenlights is not completed. The software has been released as Free Software under GPL. Our documentation video shows all aspects of the project in 11 minutes. For the friends of Blinkenlights we have prepared a little trailer movie [QuickTime 5 Format, 3,2 MB] [MPEG-1 Format, 3 MB]. If you want the soundtrack of the trailer have a look here. Overview Using your mobile phone you could play Pong with Blinkenlights or your friend. The program Blinkenpaint enables you to create your own animations allowing you to take part in our contest. For the nerds there is a description of the Blinkenlights Movie format and a couple of nice tools to display and convert your animations. A look behind the scenes reveals some technical details of our system. A list of press reports about Blinkenlights und a couple of interesting links to other projects complete the overview. Get a regular update on what is going on with the project on our News page. WebCam Those who wanted to have a remote view on the building were able to have a look at the pictures of our webcam. The WebCam is no longer in operation. We are going to publish the WebCam picture archive here soon. The BerlinOnline WebCam looked at Blinkenlights as well, although it was a bit more distant than our cam. Maybe you find some nice pictures in their archive as well.

Re:An idea...

[jonnosan]

err... if you actually read the site, setting this up involved painting every window white and wiring up 160 lamps with over 5000m of cable.

That's one heck of a covert operation if you can pull that off without a little inside assistance!

StarWars

[halftrack]

Everytime someone mentions Blinkenlights I think about StarWars.

(If it hangs then I can tell you it's a complete remake of StarWars episode IV)

Re:I don't think that this is a good project.

[cavac]

I'm not sure you got the basics right.

Sure, the framerate may drop down to one frame per minute if you display stills. But that doesn't change the REFRESH-RATE that makes the actual display. Some of the existing hardware-projects to a refresh-rate of some hundreds refreshes per second - fast enough even for your eyes to catch up.

Anyway, i've never heard of a low framerate damaging your brain or your eyes. Otherwise low quality MPEG and DivX should have killed quite a lot of people (or at least made them blind). ;-)

LLAP & LG
Rene