Dormitory Turned Into Huge Color Display 69
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."
But... (Score:2, Funny)
Name of the first song on the video? (Score:1)
Re:Name of the first song on the video? (Score:5, Informative)
Nice! Does anyone know the name of the first song on the hour long video? That's a really nice chiptune.
Well, it was driving me insane as I have been listening to Chiptune songs for the last 2-3weeks, and I knew I had heard it, so after a search through my play list, here it is:
Mr. Spastic - Sloppy
His album and many great others can be got for free (under creative commons) from 8bit Peoples [8bitpeoples.com]
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Resolution? (Score:5, Funny)
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badass (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.
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Re:badass (Score:4, Funny)
In my university the only thing you see on dorm windows is stacked bottles of beer. Seriously.
You went to the wrong school. At my university the dorm windows were full of stacked coeds. Seriously. :-P
Re:badass (Score:5, Funny)
Admit it - You only know that because you read about it on IRC one Saturday night, when everyone else had gone out.
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My brother stacks Yoghurt pots there.
Yeah, he's a bit weird.
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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.
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I wonder what it would be to live in one of the dorms when you actually do not want your window to be a part of this "experiment" or the noise outside.
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I dunno, man. Watching this today, I thought it was incredibly cool. But when I was in college 20 years ago, I was a different person. It was a difficult time for me, socially, and my dorm room was the only place I could "get away" when I needed to. I think I might have been a little bitter if I was told I had to let someone in to wire up lights, and essentially be kicked out on show night ('cuz it's not like you could study or sleep in there when the show was on). I find it hard to believe that with a
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That was 25 years ago. I was "lighter" than my roommate who used to throw shoes at everyone at the throwable distance when his sleep was disturbed. He is the president of the company and I am not :-)
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Why the hell would you live in a dorm if you didn't want noise, light and disturbance?
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25 years ago we did not have many options. Hostel was the cheapest.
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Maybe I'm just jaded, but it's not really impressive in 2009, when it's practically the 100th time people have done this and you can assemble a similar light show in a matter of hours with readily-available equipment and software.
Ten years ago we were saying "Huh, neat!" at these setups, today it's more of a "Lern2hack" reaction.
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Wow, really? You can read the manual on some "ready-available equipment and software" and assemble it the way the engineers intended?
Just because a product already exists doesn't make it any less impressive to build your own from scratch. These guys designed their own serial network and used it to switch multiple big electrical loads and it was robust enough for other students to play with. They did all this on a limited budget and also persuaded the entire dorm to let them install the hardware.
If they were
In related news... (Score:3, Interesting)
No seriously, if you can insert an image into the summary why is it such a rarity?
bit porn (Score:2, Funny)
Duke Nukem (Score:1)
Amazing what you can do with 120 pixels (Score:5, Interesting)
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I would so love to hack that thing to GOATSE the whole city.
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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
fast too (Score:2)
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Re:This has been done before (Score:5, Funny)
Blinkenlicht (Score:4, Informative)
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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.
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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).
Sort like your nickname "Snoopy"? ;)
Now, seriously... I've always felt that way too, yet I wonder why could that be so.
More specifically in the IT field, there are lots and lots of (at least theoretically) qualified people (and many left PL to work abroad since there are no enough jobs). With so many people, why there's no real breakthrough happening there?
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Social realities (you really don't want me to get into factors that shape them...) at work, I guess. Few I could think of immediatelly:
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_Sovieticus [wikipedia.org] (don't limit this effect to failings of soviet block though - I'd say it's also cultivated by, still vast here, infuence of religious authorities...)
- Poland has a background of unqestioned fascination with everything exotic (and at the same time trying to ignore good local stuff) spanning several centuries (noble caste from XVI
In Finland too, back in 2007 (Score:4, Informative)
The biggest apartment building [wikipedia.org] in nordic countries, when undergoing renovation, was set up in a similar fashion...see http://www.mikontalolights.fi/en/ [mikontalolights.fi]
Includes a video. [mikontalolights.fi]
Only four colours? (Score:1)
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Probablly not that much harder, as I see it there are two main issues
1: getting bulbs the right colors for a good RGB mix. In particular you want quite high saturation colors (close to pure spectrals) which means more loss in the coloring.
2: you would have to design the control boards to be able to dim rather than just switch (using commercial stage dimmer packs would probablly be probibitively expensive).
B.E.E.R.??? (Score:1)
Re:B.E.E.R.??? (Score:4, Informative)
"Piwo" as a word in Polish means beer.
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easter egg at 7:00 (Score:1)
I love this stuff!! (Score:1)
Incandescent lamps response times suck, I wonder if they biased them a little as it can help dramatically.
What did they use SCR's, Triac's, MOSFET's? Looks like a bank of opto isolators to Triac's in the photos.
Cool!
What a shock (Score:2)
Maybe this will answer the great question... (Score:2)
How many Polacks does it take to screw in a few hundred light bulbs and wire them into a computer?
(joking aside... neat stuff)
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Operating System? (Score:1)
Should put to rest (Score:1)