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A Giant DIY LED Display

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the cross-town-messaging-systems dept.

smf28 writes "Dheera Venkatraman has created a giant DIY LED display featuring 36 blue Luxeons in a 6x6 array on the windows of Simmons Hall, an undergraduate dormitory at MIT famous (or infamous, if you wish) for its design. Recent uses included welcoming students in September, Pirate Day, and others."

6 of 69 comments (clear)

  1. Microchip PICs by bhima · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Another fine use for PICs. I love these things...

    --
    Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
  2. Blinkenlights? by Animaether · · Score: 4, Interesting

    http://www.blinkenlights.de/index.en.html

    And I *know* there was a Dutch team that did much the same as well, and a Dutch commercial venture (was it KPN - Dutch telecom?) has one still up and running, I think.

    But I guess they didn't use the Ooh! Shiny! blue LEDs :)

  3. Re:Slashdotted by suv4x4 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Trust slashdot to put the lights out! Someone should build a mirror array.

    You know, people like you who keep reminding us of the "slashdot effect" always get modded up since it flatters the slashdot readers that theya re part of something big, the colective power of which can bring a server down.

    Truth is the slashdot effect is nothing like what it used to be when blog had decent articles (versus unchecked factas, duped, misinformation etc. in massive quantities).

    And second, you can bring a small server, or a site on a shared server relatively easily with couple of hundred people visiting at once. The key is they visit at once, since if they didn't, the same server would take easily a 50-100k people during the span of a day.

  4. Re:Circuit design error by dheera · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Thanks for the suggestions. The PIC should actually be able to drive the MOSFET, it's just that there ends up being some small amount of ringing, which then [in some way that I didn't bother to analyze] caused the entire thing to hang. Adding the resistors killed that and made it work especially for cases where a large fraction of the entire array is suddenly turned on. But yeah, redoing it with better power supplies and power circuitry would definitely be something to do when we get time. At the time it was built we were trying to finish as quickly as possible and used ATX power supplies which are essentially free at MIT (you find them lying around in dumped computers everywhere).

  5. Re:Slashdotted by dheera · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I looked at my logs. It's probably the initial rush of visits in the first couple of minutes. A potential "slashdotting-protection" system that could be implemented by large sites is to select different IP ranges at random and serve up the site with a 0, 30, 60, 90, 120, 150, or 180 second delay based on the incoming IP range (i.e. if you're in the IP range corresponding to the 120 second delay, the article doesn't even show up for you until 120 seconds after it has been posted. I don't know if this has other moral issues, or if it's Slashdot's responsibility to care, but it's just a thought about a hypothetical solution.

  6. Re:Delft University of Technology was first by belg4mit · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Sorry, no. Thank you for playing.

    Those just happen to be the incidents that someone got photographs of,
    there have been many more, including Tetris.

    --
    Were that I say, pancakes?