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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...