[Julien] sent in his group’s twist on the now classic blinkenlights project. Oddly, the writeup is entirely in jpg form, so I can’t know if he’s finished it yet. One of them promised to send it in during our New uses for old CRT monitors HackIt, so it’s nice to hear something about it. While the classic blinkenlights uses building windows as pixels, this version divides CRT displays into four squares.
4 thoughts on “CRT Blinkenlights”
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The project is functional as of now, the team has made one mainboard and 5 daughter boards so they can controll 25 screens (a 10*10 matrix). It’s running smoothly animations (we can achieve a 30 fps) but now we need to make it better : more screens, a better API, few games (pong, snake, etc), more screens, etc.). So this hack is never ending :)
The main problem is the fact it consumes a lot of power (5Kw as of now) and it is not easy to move around, but we’re working on it to make it a long time installation in our school (http://www.isen.fr/)
Putting their entire write up in a picture was a bit strange, that kind of makes it so they can’t be found by search engines as easily.
I suppose it takes less energy to run than the original >22KW Blinkenlights, and it is cheaper and friendlier than letting those crts hit the landfill, but I’d like to see something to cut power consumption.
the crt moniter i have (rather old one) goes through a similar sequence if left with no signal for 30 secs but rather then just boxes it makes some weird effects ……… the first time it had started i thought my video card was going to need an exorsisem or something