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Programming IT Technology

The Lights Keep on Blinken 61

Posted by michael from the fingerpoken-good dept.
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!"."
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The Lights Keep on Blinken More

The Lights Keep on Blinken

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  • Was allready done long before (Score:3, Informative)

    by MuppetsCmdr ( 265082 ) <L.MolNO@SPAMet.tudelft.nl> on Sunday January 12, 2003 @05:27AM (#5066024) Homepage
    In november 1995, the ETV - student association of EE, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands - allready did a similar thing. [tudelft.nl]
    It's in Dutch, but there are some pictures.
    • Sure. Common story. Maybe one of the reasons why it didn't catch on then (or even earlier) was that it happened in, ahh, Delft ;) Or maybe it had something to do with the general interest in technology related stuff at the time. Or it could simply be that CCC's propaganda chor is better placed (considering one of their agents managed to infiltrate ICANN ;)

  • The full Blinkenlights story (Score:5, Informative)

    by buulu ( 580868 ) on Sunday January 12, 2003 @05:32AM (#5066030)
    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.

  • An idea... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by neksys ( 87486 ) <grphillips AT gmail DOT com> on Sunday January 12, 2003 @05:37AM (#5066036)
    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.

    • Re:An idea... (Score:3, Informative)

      by jonnosan ( 300963 )
      err... if you actually read the site [blinkenlights.de], setting this up involved painting every window white and wiring up 160 lamps with over 5000m of cable.

      That's one heck of a covert operation if you can pull that off without a little inside assistance!
      • For Arcade they developed a set of nice Hardware for some kind of distributed computing so they save some of the more weird cabling stuff.

        So far this kind of system has worked very nice but seems a little too expensive for me. I'll try this with only a simple LED board on top of the Zilog Development board ('bout 50 Dollar for a grown 8-Bit Computer with Flash-Rom, On-Chip-Debugger, 60-Bit Interface and even an IrDA-Controller seems worth a try. I could always use this as a nice doorstop if it fails :-)

    • I remember seeing this in Fight Club.
    • As has been said, that would be nearly impossible. However, with a big enough projector, you can project your message onto their wall, as the Stop the War Coalition [stopwar.org.uk] did.
  • I was in Berlin last February and I saw Blinkenlights on the evening of 12th at Alexanderplatz and it was so great to watch. Hopefully we'll see something like this again some time. I wasn't able to make it to the one in Paris, but I'm sure it was just as great to watch.

    dacs

  • Tsk, tsk, tsk. "Das Blinkenlights" is much older. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 12, 2003 @05:41AM (#5066046)
    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.

  • StarWars (Score:4, Informative)

    by halftrack ( 454203 ) <{jonkje} {at} {gmail.com}> on Sunday January 12, 2003 @06:24AM (#5066111) Homepage
    Everytime someone mentions Blinkenlights I think about StarWars [blinkenlights.nl].

    (If it hangs then I can tell you it's a complete remake of StarWars episode IV)

  • Consideration... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Ozan ( 176854 ) on Sunday January 12, 2003 @06:56AM (#5066157) Homepage
    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...
    • Number 3/4 sound somewhat like Blinkenspam: "Buy Viagra online" would be a favourite...

      Would it be possible for AOL to get their CD's shipped that way, too...?
    • 1. Install fancy moving pictures in a small box in peoples' houses
      2. Control these boxes to show various sitcoms, films, cartoons, etc.
      3. Show animated ads with this technology
      4. Profit!

      :)

    • God, imagine if every office building sold its night real estate to advertisers. It would be much easier than the CCC operation if the building were designed with central light control from the start, and with modern small floresents the wear would be insignificant. You sir, should have been shot before being able to come up with this idea.

  • In addition to others that did something similar, the BBL headoffice in Brussels, Belgium have even made a contest out of it in December '99. You could download a program and send in your own animations, see BBLMarnix2000 [marnix2000.bbl.be]. It was fun to see the animations when driving towards it. Some can still be viewed in the archive.
    • don't 4get the animated westinghouse logos on pittsburgh's norsside, from the '50s...

      the sign was 6 or 8 circle Ws:

      O O O
      \/ \/ (imagine a circle around this;-)
      ---

      in blue neon, with each element separately controlled to make an animation of every on/off combination/permutation, marching left2right, all night long;-)
  • I forgot to mention that there ARE hardware-project already available. But they all need to have a running PC. My "Phase II"-Hardware Player should be portable. Most likely it will also include the original PONG-Game so you can use it as some kind of portable BLINKENLIGHTS-Gameboy or so :-)
  • What does the Z8 Encore bring to the party that you can't get from other, better-supported microcontrollers? For instance, the TI MSP430 [ti.com] parts? It's a low-cost 16-bit microcontroller with a PDP-11-like architecture. Very nice for writing assembly, AND it is well-suited to a C compiler (unlike the Z8).

    Or, if you want to attach the nodes to Ethernet, the Ubicom IP2022 [ubicom.com]. It's still reasonably inexpensive, but has 64K of Flash, 20K of RAM, and built-in 10baseT Ethernet support. That way you don't have to invent any new protocols to wire the things up.

    The only drawback of the IP2022 is that the SDK is somewhat expensive. If you just want basic tools (a compiler, assembler, linker, and debugger), you can use the GNU tools. But the SDK includes the Ethernet driver, TCP/IP stack, small HTTP server, etc., which would be useful for an application like this.

    Disclaimer: I've worked for Ubicom for a little over four months. Before that, I was a satisfied customer, having designed their SX part into the first generation ReplayTV box to handle IR remote functions.

    • What does the Z8 Encore bring to the party that you can't get from other, better-supported microcontrollers? For instance, the TI MSP430 [ti.com] parts? It's a low-cost 16-bit microcontroller with a PDP-11-like architecture. Very nice for writing assembly, AND it is well-suited to a C compiler (unlike the Z8).


      Well, i'll start with the Encore 'cause there already shipped and should arrive at the end of the week.

      But thanx for the information!

      Wanna join the project? The more help i get here the faster i can get this project ready.
      • Well, i'll start with the Encore 'cause there already shipped and should arrive at the end of the week.
        I certainly can't argue with that. :-)
        Wanna join the project?
        I wish I could, since it sounds like a lot of fun, but I've got too many projects competing for my time already.
    • Eric Smith wrote: >The only drawback of the IP2022 is that the SDK is somewhat expensive.

      This drawback can be easily avoided, if you use ready-made module with high-level programming language.
      Check for example IPJV-ES module [svtehs.com] - it is based on the IP2022 and have embedded Java virtual machine. All necessary external interfaces available, you simply need to write your Java program and upload it to the build-in FTP - and project like this is finished.

  • I love how they moved the page to Sourceforge [sourceforge.net] due to heavy traffic from slashdot. Suck it, OSDN!
  • To quote Ted Knight in Caddyshack

    Don't you people have jobs?
  • Like the ads on the buildings in Bladerunner??
    I mean why not? They hammer us everywhere else now, they even spam our cell phones and beepers with crappy ads for crappy products.
    Might as well get the buildings going too!

    I think the project they had was cool. It was a fun thing and it had major geek factor. But I think it was a prototype for things to come..

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