Hardware Hacking Projects for Geeks

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Part II: Advanced Hacks, Tools, and Techniques

The Berlin Blinkenlights installation was planned and built in four weeks,

and ran for 23 weeks and 5 days in total. Even today, the Chaos Computer

Club (also known as the CCC) continues to improve the system, and they

have released the software for free under the GPL. Linux and PDA-based

tools and simulators for creating animations and images for the system can

be found at the Blinkenlights web site (http://www.blinkenlights.de/).

In this chapter, I will first describe how to build a smaller version that can

use the side of your house instead of a twelve-story building for the display

area. Next, I will describe how to build the project as it was implemented

in Berlin.

If you decide to wire up a large building, I would suggest that you get

together a group of friends to help out. There is a lot of wiring required to

set up this hack. If you build the smaller “home” version, you can probably

wire it yourself.

I would like to thank Björn Barnekow (programming, design), Fiedel (elec-

tronics), Packet (programming), Papillon (installation), Prom (program-

ming), Sven Neumann (programming), Tim Pritlove (project coordination),

Tobias Engel (programming), and the entire Chaos Computer Club for

their support and information. I would also like to thank Rene Schneider

for his contribution to the small-scale hardware assembly instructions.

Project Overview

There are several configurations for this hack. You can build a display sys-

tem that will fit on the side of your house, on a small desktop-size system,

or on a twelve-story building.

If you wish to build the home-size system or the desktop system, con-

tinue with the hardware construction steps here. If you wish to build the

large building system, skip ahead to the Large-Scale Hardware Assembly

Instructions section.

Small-Scale Hardware Assembly Instructions

In this section, you will assemble a custom LED driver board, construct

an LED frame, and load an application onto a PC. Obviously, the small

version of the project requires quite a bit less time to build and set up than

the building-size version. The most time-consuming task of the mini-

Blinkenlights project will probably be the wiring of the LED drivers and

the LED frame.

Blinkenlights

The term “blinkenlights” was first

coined to describe the diagnostic

lights found on many early computers.

Project Overview

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