Sure you know that Disco Stu from the simpsons has got all the moves, but what if you don’t and want to kick it like travolta? then there’s only one option: head up to MIT and check out their LED Disco Dance Floor. This thing is comprimised of 1,536 LEDs made by 20,000 hand soldered connections. that’s a lot of work. it can produce 4,096 colors, can be controlled through XMMS, handles 30fps, and the best part is that it’s 128 square feet. Yes. It’s a very impressive dance floor that has insane capability. there is a log kept which is very detailed and explains the process and how it became a technical nightmare. they made custom PCB controllers to use it and soldered day and night to complete it for a dance they were having. in the end it was pulled off and quite successfully. they also have an “epilogue” telling what changes they made after the dance to improve it. that’s MIT for ya.

thanks to everyone who sent this in.

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i’m really liking this one. A game modder who’s not even very good at programming (he keeps mentioning this) decided to make his own game out of the Super Mario Brothers (SMB) NES cartridge. He wrote the assembly (god help us all) to basically make clouds scroll across the screen and just clouds. The process shows how the graphics are contained on one chip and the code is on another. Also shown, is how to rip the chip out, re-program it with your code, and then how to shove it back in and make it work. You can see the final result by clicking here. We’d also love to see someone take a shot at this and to see what they could come up with.

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