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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.
CMU is in Pittsburgh unless you mean their west coast extension, in which case, there are just a bunch of unattractive Ph.D. students hanging out there. Caltech has even fewer women than MIT and they are also less attractive (yes, this sounds impossible, but it's true). In summary, while many Californians are attractive, they are not at Caltech or CMU.
MIT has really gone down hill on this front since the late 80s (link). I caught the tail end before that Krueger kid drank himself to death in '98. Since then, the administration has leveraged the event to change the student landscape: more "well-rounded" admittees, tighter alcohol controls, and less housing choice -- a more Ivy League-like model. I think it's a shame ... you can fix the problems (e.g., real-world competence) without making MIT less distinctive and fun. As a prelude to my graduate education, MIT was perfect.
As for the women, those at MIT were fit, sharp, non-skanky, and often quite beautiful -- no other campus I've visited/attended matches up. (De gustibus non disputandum, etc.)
There's been a bigger one though so it's not as cool.
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?
I have a cousin that was an aircraft mechanic some years ago. He once performed some maintenance on a private jet that belonged to a Saudi prince. The carpets were woven with optical fiber and the area around where you were standing would light up as you moved through the plane. This was back in the late 70s, and I have no idea what the control technology was. My cousin said (at the time) that the effect was very cool. Of course, disco was very cool back then as well, so....
Actually, DDR experience came quite handy when later on I started learning things like swing dancing.
Speaking of swing dancing and DDR, Manu Smith has apparently reprogrammed his DDR to do Lindy/Charleston/etc steps. I've not seen it personally as my legs have always been too dead, but he brought it to Swing Out New Hampshire the past few years.
"When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind." -- Bill Moyers
When I was at MIT at the start of the 80s, somebody did a study that showed that the whole "well-rounded" thing had been going in cycles for decades. Admissions would look around and realize the student body was dull as hell, and say "Oh my God, we need to admit more well rounded students." Soon academic failure rates would start to climb as the creative, well rounded types were distracted from the academic grind by creative and well rounded activities. Then they'd say, "Oh my God, we need to admit more academically focused student." Repeat basically forever.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
We wrote our own custom plugin. It has the ability to dynamically control the frame rate. There's also a pre-generated animation format (though I didn't work on that). People have been using Matlab to generate patterns, then we load them and display them on the floor (for example, the expanding wave and spotlight patterns)
Yes, superbright LEDs (got a great bulk rate deal). I didn't work with the hardware, so I don't know about the part numbers. Give us some time, we should be adding some more info to the website. Or email the list.
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