[Boz] wants to build a retrocomputer, but where to start? You could start with the computery bits, like say the CPU or the bus architecture, but where’s the fun in that? Instead, [Boz] built a righteous blinkenlights array.
What’s cool about this display is that it’s ready to go out of the box. All of the LEDs are reverse-mount and assembled by the board maker. The 19″ 2U PCBs serve as the front plates, so [Boz] was careful not to use any through-hole parts, which also simplified the PCB assembly, of course. Each slice has its own microcontroller and a few shift registers to get the bits lit up, and that’s all there is to it. They take incoming data at 9600 baud and output blinkiness.
Right now it pulls out its bytes from his NAS. We’re not sure which bytes, and we think we see some counters in there. Anyway, it doesn’t matter because it’s so pretty. And maybe someday the prettiness will lure [Boz] into building a retrocomputer to go under it. But honestly, we’d just relax and watch the blinking lights.
Thinking Machines homage! There’s one (not powered, sadly) at the NSA Museum in Virginia. ALL the blinkenlights!
ok i need one
I like. A computer really is dressed up with ’em :) . Instead of ‘just’ LED lighting of cases … add some led ‘panels’. One of the reasons I gravitated to the PiDP-8, PiDP 11/70, and PiDP 10 kits on my computer wall. Look over and see all the blink’n lights is great!
Real Computers have switches and lights. Same reason 8 y.o. me was attracted to them!
I have a PiDP-8 kit on my shelf, blinking away, and the front panel of a Nova 3 above it — waiting for me to build an Arduino light driver for it…gotta get around to that…
One thing a lot of fake blinkenlight panels miss is that the blinken isn’t random. There will be a few registers which are always a blur, like the IP, stack pointer if the machine has one, and accumulator, a few others that change frequently but also pause long enough to read sometimes, like paging registers, and then lots of stuff that just sits there for long periods until it’s needed when it might blink briefly before settling on a new value.
I heard that Thinking Machines blinkenlights were completely independent from the actual machine and random.
Wikipedia says otherwise:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connection_Machine#Visual_design
That’s much better than I thought then, thanks for the correction.
Should be accompanied by old-school computer sound.
It’s just missing the sound https://youtu.be/65YRAVMeSrc