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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!"."
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.
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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.
I confess, I don't know much about how this system works... but wouldn't this be a neat way to get your protest message across? I mean, say you oppose Nike's sweat shop labour practices. Go to Nike headquarters, covertly set up the system, program a message like, "Just Don't Do It" or whatever strikes your fancy, and time it to start in the middle of the night. I expect the first few incidences would get huge media exposure, and have the added benefit of being somewhat more acceptable to the general public - thus, getting your message across to more people. I know it'd certainly grab my attention... you can see only so many crowds with signs before you sort of ignore them.
Every generation thinks that they invented they latest gizmo. The "Blinkenlights" referenced at http://www.jargonfile.com/jargon/html/entry/blinke nlights.html
as being from 1959 is actually a rehash of a sign for radio transmitters (das transmittenmachinen). I was working on my novice ticket when I first saw a very yellowed version taped to a radio transmitter in 1962 at my "Elmer's" house in Key West, FL. He had been a radio operator on merchant ships going back to spark gap days and had picked up the sign somewhere along the way. Everything old is new again.
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)
Look a monkey!
1. Install fancy blinking lights in a building
2. Controll these lights to show various animations, attracting people to stare at them
3. Show animated ads in size of a whole building with this technology
4. Profit!!
Now if I only knew what to put in step 3... uh wait a second...
This is one reason why you should always play 3D games like Quake on fast computers - if the fps rate is below 15 this effect might damage your eyes.
Perhaps you need to decrease the refresh rate for your canabis intake. That is just plain nutty. You can't DAMAGE yourself neurologically with blinken-ness, though you may induce epilepsy in certain folk (Which I guess could cause damage), but it's pretty unlikely. Either way, your eyes will be fine. There really just little camera-thingees with some nerves and fotocells attached.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
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
Look, this thing is totally safe! Built it myself, you know. You just press that button like this and then turn that lev
Or, if you want to attach the nodes to Ethernet, the Ubicom IP2022. It's still reasonably inexpensive, but has 64K of Flash, 20K of RAM, and built-in 10baseT Ethernet support. That way you don't have to invent any new protocols to wire the things up.
The only drawback of the IP2022 is that the SDK is somewhat expensive. If you just want basic tools (a compiler, assembler, linker, and debugger), you can use the GNU tools. But the SDK includes the Ethernet driver, TCP/IP stack, small HTTP server, etc., which would be useful for an application like this.
Disclaimer: I've worked for Ubicom for a little over four months. Before that, I was a satisfied customer, having designed their SX part into the first generation ReplayTV box to handle IR remote functions.
I love how they moved the page to Sourceforge due to heavy traffic from slashdot. Suck it, OSDN!
sulli
RTFJ.