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USB Disco Dance Floor
pi42 writes "Some MIT students built this USB controlled disco dance floor for their dorm lounge. It was built in a week, has 1536 LEDs, 20,000 hand-soldered connections, and is capable of displaying 12-bit color. Check out videos and photos." You can even send the floor an email, though it might not write back.
I'm sure the parties will be rocking!
So while Caltech is traveling across the country to put up balloons, MIT students are building a kickass USB-controlled disco floor? I think we all know which school knows where it's at.
Disco Stu likes to go down with the boogie! Reminds me of Leisure Suit Larry 1....
Spelling mistakes: My is english spoken not tongue of mother.
The girls always go for John Travolta, not Poindexter
Do a little dance, make a little love - get down tonight!
It's actually worth it to click on the link to pictures in this story.
that is really awesome, they should sell some of those things :-D I would love one of those in my house with some touch sensors too so the floor can light up when I walk on it!
Screw that disco crap. I can see a better use for it.
A Giant Tetris Board. Think of it. You've got the grid-like squares that Tetris has.
Yes! I listen to NYC Speedcore and do math at 3AM. I suggest you try it too.
I had the opportunity to go to several parties in Boston a few years back. A couple at Harvard and a couple at MIT and a couple near BU. Needless to say, the quality of the parties was inversely proportional to the U.S. News and World Report rankings of these schools. Not to take anything away from the homely girls and stereotypical MIT men, but MIT parties were only slightly better than the Harvard parties in terms of fun. However, Harvard edged out MIT in terms of attractive women (much to Mrs. Claus' chagrin).
Boston U had the best combination of attractive women and fun parties, though the "talent" pool in Boston left much to be desired.
What would be nice is to have this floor shipped over to Caltech or CMU where the attractive and successful Californians can take full advantage of it. The MIT geeks can still control the floor remotely from their dorms in Boston.
Just imagine a Beowulf cluster of these things!
MIT... dancefloor...
There is a joke in there somewhere, I just know it.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
If only I had thought of that 20 years ago when disco was 'in' and I was a uni (college if you live in the US). There may have been some chance of spending nights with a real girl in stead of a cold, cold terminal. On the other hand. Probably not.
I think that those MIT kids need some dance lessons.
I bet they are having to beat hot babes off the dance floor now to make sure all the hotties get a fair chance to show their goodies.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Anyone else starting to think on DDR with a big dancefloor instead of a tiny dancemat? With all thoose touch sensors...
The Robot! old skool geeks, word to ya mammas
"Who says nothing is impossible? Some people do it every day!" - Alfred E. Neuman
..now if they could just learn how to dance.
Notice the Coral Cache links on the page.. avi
http://ec.mit.edu.nyud.net:8090/ddf/ddf-demo-divx
ttp:ecmitedunyudnet8090ddfddf-demomov
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Any bets on how long until a Tetris clone is implemented for this?
Apparently the panels also have pressure sensors on them -- that's so cool. It sounds they have the hardware they need for an awesome game of massively-multiplayer Twister or Mosh Mosh Revolution. Variants of pinball, pong, or arkanoid could also be fun, with virtual paddles drawn wherever there were two nearby pressure points (i.e. feet).
Wow, they did such a good job with the floor. The party looked ok, except for the rather slim pickings for girls.
.mov file to 28 MB?
my question is this....How come they could only compress the
Mark
That's pretty cool. Does anyone perchance have instructions/directions on how one could go about building one for themselves? Such an idea could be taken to a higher level and placed within a nightclub. At that time, the USB controller could be used to literally "follow the music" which would enhance the nightlife quite a bit. If worst comes to worst, the lights could all be aimed and pointed at a cute girl too ;)
I see this, sitting in my dorm room at 4:30AM and I say to myself, wow, if I were more productive I'd be building something like this instead of reading slashdot. Then I realize that I'm lazy and stop this line of inquiry before it makes me want to actually get up and do something, maybe next week......
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
Looks suitable enough as a screen to me (-:
How long do you think you could stare at the floor before falling over/vomiting/having a seizure? I'm going with 15 minutes.
I'm sure this technology could be marketable to some night clubs. Imagine a larger version of this where the patterns change smoothly or can even play commercials or music videos. The floor is like a giant LCD screen.
Of course to withstand the stress of night clubbing the floor would have to be tested thoroughly. Spilt drinks would not do much good to all those hand soldered leds. Some kind of coating or modular easily exchangeable sealed floor tiles maybe.
about MIT students partying, or some variation on that theme
what are they for? Construction and FAQ didn't mention, and I'm too young to have caught the disco era...
I so want to build one of these
The resolution was 16x32. Also, I wonder what the refresh rate is like. The page is a bit short on details.
My other first post is car post.
http://www.lightspace.biz/
If You RTFA, you'd have noticed that they are so busy patting their own backs, that they forgot to post a real howto. where are the schematics, the PCB layouts, the blueprints for the design? Nowhere to be found, but you can sure see who is the ueber disco geek.
/.? Some geeks wanking their dicks?
Why is this on
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
1. Funny how the average distance between dancers was like 5ft. 2. Pressure sensors => Tetris where you tap to rotate, and have to run and follow you piece down.
Sounds like Dance Dance Revolution on steroids :)
After watching the video, my first thought was, "Surely they could find some attractive girls who actually knew how to dance for this..."
Then I remembered who was responsible...
You? Dancing?
Well, back to studying for my Caltech entrance exams.
Anyone here know how to blow up a baboon?
128sq feet of geeks dancing?
Yeah, that has rockin' party written ALL over it.
All men can fly, but sadly, only in one direction--Down.
Since when is DJ Shadow geek music?
Sample this!
Is that Napoleon Dynamite on the Construction Photos? YEAH!!!
t p://www.imdb.com/title/tt0374900/
http://web.mit.edu/storborg/ddf/photos.html
ht
did it get them laid?
http://www.thegreynomads.com
You can even send the floor an email, though it might not write back.
I don't see the part about emailing the disco floor (unless it's in the video which I haven't seen yet.) You can email the creators, but not the floor itself.
...is to learn how to dance.
or else!
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This thing in friggin' awesome! I love it! This just goes to show that we geeks can come up with some wicked cool stuff that the general tech-ignorant populace can appreciate! (How often does that happen? Seriously) Way to go fellas!
The pressure sensors are still a work in progress. Everything in the video is computer controlled.
Seriously, I saw one girl in there who was apparantly there to test the floor's durability.
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If the email is for sending images to display on the dance floor, I just hope no one will send a picture of the goatse guy.
The odds are good, but the goods are odd.
Snickersnee3: Build your own 3-watt Luxeon Star headlamp from scratch
Mit? Students?
they had chicks to dance with...
DON'T PANIC
Flashy
Expensive
Over-complicated
still doesn't get you laid
Where's the pole?
Of *course* the documents from the 1970s CIA sponsored mind control experiments via the use of multicolored lights were destroyed!
</tinfoil hat>
Some days it's just not worth
chewing through my restraints.
So that's what MIT chics look like... ...Run away! Run away!
USB Connection + 12 Bit Big Led Display + 30fps == Paris Hilton pr0n on the floor..
HEHE.. nice.. i want one of those shits.
We thought here of making something similar that even mimics the "Dance Dance Revolution" machine that you find in video arcades, haven't figured out how to sense the pressure though, any ideas?
Laser beams can make the same effects on the floor, but much cheaper.
May Peace Prevail On Earth
They go for Neo though, didn't they? Almost every girl I know like "The Matrix" movie because of him.
May Peace Prevail On Earth
U kiddin..... my terminal was *HOT*. :-D
hilarious
Winamp AVS, need I say more?
As you can see on the video, the floor surface was thoroughly stress-tested by a 300-pound hippopotamus on high heels doing the macarena.
"We have an A-Bomb...what more do you want, mermaids?" --I.I. Rabi, speaking in defense of Robert Oppenheimer
I want one but man, soldering 1,444,000 led's would be a bit tiring.
Setting his threshold to 5, Sparky eliminated most of the trolls on /.
Other than that, looks awsome! And it has a custom XMMS plugin!
In America, you spam computers In Soviet Russia, computers spam you!
Anyone else remember trailblazer from the Commodore 64???? This would be a superb platform to implement the game concept on.
I gotta get me one of those. I wish I had done that in college. Unfortunately I was creating a double spout, four valvue, six can beer bong with my beer chuggin buddy. Oh those were great times...
and...who's writing the firmware update and driver so I can hook up my PSP to this thing?
Geeks have all the fun!
Since when did a prank/hack war include getting stories posted to Slashdot? Though admittedly their dance floor is pretty cool.
The First East Disco Dance Floor
...best parties ever! (I think not...)
1,536 LEDs
128 square feet
4,096 colors
30 frames/second
20,000 hand-soldered connections
100+ Nerds
Zero chicks
Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated up.
The lyric ('More than ever hour after hour work is never over') on the front page, on top of the discofloor is by Daft Punk, 'Harder, Better, Faster, stronger'. I like songs that increase productivity.
Now all they need to do is invent some robot girls to dance with!
There should be touch sensors in there so that they can play Missile Command with their feet.
We had Beat Street Two - Electric Bugaloo... what's next? Beat Street Three - MIT?
The solution to that problem is left as an exercise to the reader.
Man, for what I could see, this First East group have some good chicks! even, if you enter to their homepage you can go to the girls homepage and see some pictures.
I guess it has sense to create the Disco no? hehe
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
What? Me worry?
For anyonw who might wonder the music being played in the video is DJ Shadow - Organ Donor
But they all have to dance with bare feet.
Yeah I can see people doing that!
Though you've be able to have a great Tetris or Space Invader game on the floor!
Bexley had the same thing 20 years ago and that one was controlled with your mind! Man, I miss their parties. Sorry, what were we talking about?
"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity but they've always worked for me" - HST
Still sucks!
Next year, they should build a larger version for the outside of their dorm and act as a light&sound organ, like the control building at the top of Devil's Tower in Close Encounters.
Then they can use it to tell mom & dad they're homesick, and will they come pick them up for a short visit?
See my journal, I write things there
With all the advancements we have seen in technology in the last decade or two, you'd think the average clubbing experience would stay within 15 years of it, I used to work lights at a club and they had boring lighting systems running on DOS.
Isn't it about time computers started doing less to bore us, and more to excite us? OUTSIDE of the home?
This disco-floor is really cool!
Actually I'm working on a similar project ( I want to make some fancy lights for my living room ), so I was wondering, how did they manage to control all the LED's and to dimm them with that budget?
How do you control / dimm such LED array?
Denis
Hey, I remember when this first came out it was always on /.'s And it never seems to work!
Is there anything better than clicking through Microsoft ads on Slashdot?
As luck would have it, I recently decided to try to build and interface USB devices, but have been having a hard time finding decent information online about it. The page mentions that they use Atmel controllers (which I was looking at), but that's about as technical as the page gets. Does anyone have any good URLs for interfacing USB microcontrollers?
http://bike.stu.ph/rides - free GPS routes available for Garmin, Magellan, GPX and Google Earth
Is it USB powered?
and some scorpions.... http://johnbokma.com/pet/scorpion/detection-using- uv-leds.html
( scroll down for the pics )
Perl Programmer for hire
Like any real-world project, it cost more than they expected: How much did it cost?
Too much. Fortunately, we were funded by many generous sources. The total came to around $2,500. Thanks to the economies of scale, larger floor could probably be built for not much more, although a smaller floor would probably cost about as much.
Seriously, though... we designed our floor to be very, very cheap to build. However, the tradeoff was that it required lots and lots of skilled labor.
So what was it -- cheap or costly?
One man's Funny is another man's Offtopic.
does it draw power from the usb bus or does it require an external power supply?
I look forward to seeing the programming contests for this.
Real-time exploration of the Mandelbrot set using footprint movements as an input device.
Reaction Diffusion equations to give that rippling water effect as someone walks along.
Real-time display of a Voronoi diagram based on the location of users.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
the only reason you created this dance floor is that you can dance this mega hit in the proper environment. Now send us the real video please.
Mosh Mosh Revolution? Finally! A DDR game for punk/metal freaks! Does it come with spiked cuffs, collar, and red/white laced boots, or do you have to pay extra for those?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Anyone know who does the music in the demo movie or what the name of the song/mix/whatever is? Pretty cool...
With the first link, the chain is forged.
nt
Jesus used to be my co-pilot, but we crashed in the mountains and I had to eat him.
A quote from their web site:
"We do believe our dorm lounge is probably the coolest in the world."
This makes those of us who listened to the likes The Clash and Elvis Costello at college snigger so hard that snot comes out of our noses and onto our suits.
No but, yeah but, no but...
I guess we all know which school Napoleon Dynamite will be attending in the fall.
I mean if you're gonna have dance skills, you gotta have a sweet floor.
CalTech...Idiots!
GET FREE APPLE STUFF!
Can you play Tetris on it?
this is the best disco dance floor I've seen in over 25 years....well....it's the only disco dance floor I've seen in over 25 years
Those who know, do not speak. Those who speak, do not know. ~Lao Tzu
I want one!
Maybe not as a dance floor, but as a regular floor. Imagine the stuff you can do if you can make your floor any colour, any pattern, whenever you feel like it...
Then again, reading's a bitch when the light comes from below. Damn.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
this was made during IAP, the month between semesters during which students come back to campus to hang out, go to seminars, and build disco dance floors.
we don't get scholorships...
I run into this a lot with new engineers. In one case where I work, and newbie was running a DSP chip at four times the clock speed required to get the job done simply because the DSP could go that fast. Hello... increased heat. Hello... that clock frequency could show up in-band in the sensitive RF circuits nearby where as the 1/4 rate is going to get bandpass filtered out even if it bleeds in. Hello... a more holistic approach, please.
Actually, I'd have put processing into each square, and make the floor play Conway's game of "Life". :) You know, I may build a wall like this.
The questions is can you play pong on it?
- The emails you send do not get displayed on the floor, in case you were wondering. Ddf is just the email list.
-
The people dancing in the video are not at a party, but members of a theater group that were recuited after their performance to shoot the video. At parties it's much groovier.
-
The tiles on the floor can be controlled in real time, and by either a standalone program or an XMMS plugin (a spectrum analyzer is working as of recently) And yes, it should be relatively trivial to program tetris for it, though it hasn't been done yet.
- Our inspirational song is "Work it" by Daft Punk.
Aaron S.The Adventures of Jonathan Gullible: A Free Market Odyssey
OK, so how long until they figure out they can use this thing to play tetris?
"Build a USB dance floor, gosh!"
Whenever I see something like this coming from MIT, I always think "man, I really should have applied to MIT" - know what I mean?
The true question comes, can you show porn on it? Because every good engineering student knows the first thing you do with anything that can display any sort of image is put porn on it.
Case in point. I had a friend who was able to hack his TI-92 to display grayscale, so what else would he use it for other than porn. It was fantastic!
Poor deluded darlings.
Sub-floor disco lighting went out with Saturday Night Fever.
Haven't you ever held a torch to your chin?
Sub-floor illumination is highly unflattering: that's why we junked it!
----------------------
Boy's Own
http://www.boysown.com
Hmmm, given a lot of geeks are the most svelt people in the world I wonder if the floor gets dead pixels when they play "Jump Around!" and other similar songs?
At least dead pixels on this display are easier to fix! Just throw in the guy that solders with his feet!
--Pete
My first day in Boston, they assigned me a single in East Campus. There were some guys staggering around that looked as if they hadn't slept in days. There was a tiny sink right in the room, like it was the cheapest motel ever. And some tool had written Green's Theorem on the wall in big green symbols. I spent one night there and pledged a frat the next. The thought of living there still gives me shivers of dread.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
Better yet, MilkDrop is the shiznit.
The best features are the MilkDrop-is-your-Windows-desktop-background mode, and full screen mode.
The optimal performance requirements are kind of steep though, IMO.
rag on MIT chicks and how ugly they are? I've spent the last 5 years here and have been amazed at the hundreds of attractive girls...I'd trade a night with a gaggle of Hollywood models for a night with one of my dorm-mates...
They covered this in the FAQ. What? You didn't actually read it?
...I actually saw the pictures... ...and then the movies... ...and then the movies of MIT students "dancing" on it... ...and then what an MIT soldering-iron jockey's idea of film editing meant... ...I'd say "they must've sniffed too many flux fumes," but no, that's not going to be what caused this...
The floor is really very impressive, and there was a really good party on the hall, but it was the same night as Deli Haus and I was a little fucked up, so I don't remember when that was...
:)
Also, I think I was possibly the first person to break dance on the floor
..before these kids burn the place down. Cool floor though.
Okay, that floor kicks serious ass. I want to build one now.
But they certainly did things the hard way. They hand-soldered thousands of surface mounts when they could have used paste and a toaster oven. Even worse, they somehow found solder that still contains lead and sent one of their students to the doctor with lead poisoning. And finally, they used matlab of all things to make the patterns when it would have been simple to make much more complex and fascinating patterns using simple algorithms in their control code. I did it in old demos on a 486 after being inspired by an "acid" demo. I'd link to it, but tripod seems to block the download of exes now.
They're not academic scholarships.
It should stand up. Look at the fat chick in the back.
Anywhere else they'd look at the BABES.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
When will someone DoS the dancefloor?
they couldn't get into Caltech: Soldering while eating pizza is just this side of eating paint chips.
I guess girls these days aren't into dudes who can build kick ass USB dance floors.
But what about Firewire, you insensitive clod?
Warning: Could be fatal if taken seriously
where is the photo of a guy throwing up when he gets too dizzy?
I about threw up watching the videos.
I mean, who DANCES these days?
+++ATH0
Well, unless you went to private school, the public tax money that went to your education was obviously wasted. Perhaps you were a "Child Left Behind"?