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Dormitory Turned Into Huge Color Display

Posted by samzenpus on from the color-your-windows dept.

macson_g writes "Students from Wroclaw University of Technology (Poland) once again turned one of their dormitories into huge display. The project is called P.I.W.O. (B.E.E.R.). This time they converted a 10-story building into 4-color, 12x10 display. The business was used to display animations, and to play interactive games as well. On the project page (in Polish, Google translation here) you can watch an almost hour-long video, featuring music videos, a Tetris session, a dancing Michael Jackson, Duke Nukem and Mario."

6 of 69 comments (clear)

  1. badass by BeaverCleaver · · Score: 4, Interesting

    A truly neat project. Are employers impressed by such feats? They should be. Does any body have more information of this? what sort of microcontrollers used, networking protocols...

    Also the social engineering is impressive. I wouldn't have had much success asking other residents to put banks of lightglobes in their windows where I went to university, but at my school we did have an inordinate number of whiny law student types.

    --
    sustainable living
    1. Re:badass by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Looks like a Atmel AVR in 32-pin TQFP, perhaps ATmega8? Network is wired (imagine cabling the 12 rooms X 10 floors!). I bet it's some serial protocol, perhaps all floors are huge shift registers (each controller has 2+ RJ connectors to create a chain)?

      As for the social engineering, you can use a lot of social lubricant (BEER) while hand-painting the bolbs (which they did).

      PIWO acronym translates loosely to Huge Indexed Window Displayer.

  2. In related news... by Seriousity · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The Slashdot news template is converted into an image display!

    No seriously, if you can insert an image into the summary why is it such a rarity?

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    This post was made in complete sincere seriousity; as such any attempts to derive humour are doomed to instant failure.
  3. Amazing what you can do with 120 pixels by amirulbahr · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Whilst technically not very interesting, it was good to watch nonetheless and no doubt would have been a quite a sight in person. What is more interesting though is just how much content they were able to squeeze into 12x10 4-colour pixels.

    1. Re:Amazing what you can do with 120 pixels by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      We have something similar on display each night in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. It's the KPN building, a Dutch telecom company. And yes, Tetris has been played on it. Resolution is higher too.

      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qcia4Ae7Jas

  4. Re:Blinkenlicht by sznupi · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Obviously.

    No, I'm beeing serious here - it's quite typical for PL computer, internet or, in this case, "social technical experiment/fun" areas to not even try coming up with anything new, just copying (usually poorly).

    What's worse, such things grab a hold on local market far too often, through some kind of ill conceived patriotism, and create a bit of a tech ghetto here.

    --
    One that hath name thou can not otter