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."
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.
In related news... (Score:3, Interesting)
No seriously, if you can insert an image into the summary why is it such a rarity?
Amazing what you can do with 120 pixels (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:badass (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.
Re:Amazing what you can do with 120 pixels (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
Re:Blinkenlicht (Score:3, 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.