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."
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:badass (Score:3, Insightful)
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 as many as 240 students affected, there wasn't at least one poor schmuck who just wanted to be left alone.
I guess I'm just saying that I hope this wasn't crammed down everyone's throats without giving them a choice.
------RM
Re:badass (Score:2, Insightful)
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 weren't doing cool hardware projects that interact with the real world, they would have been alone in the dorm playing WoW or doing lame quizzes on FaceBook.