September, 2008

I met Bre Pettis the first time at the third Chaos Communication Camp where he asked me about Project Blinkenlights and how it all came together. Bre is a genuine all-purpose hacker who excels at explaining how stuff works and even more important: how you can do it yourself.

Bre just recently launched a fantastic new TV show called History Hacker (I can only recommend watching the show's pilot episode to get an idea). We recorded a podcast on his work at the 24C3 in Berlin. Bre describes his view of the hacker culture and his motivation to do what he does. Check it out.

Bre has now written a long article about Project Blinkenlights which comes in two parts of which the first has been now posted to his blog: Blinkenlights: The Beginning. I am really looking forward to part two and will tell you when it's available.

After squashing a gazillion of bugs in our software during this weekend, Blinkenlights Stereoscope did its first deep breath and put up the first images and animations on Toronto City Hall. There is still a lot of work ahead but we are confident to be ready to run in time for Nuit Blanche.

Blinkenlights Stereoscope is powered by a new wireless dimmer technology that has been been developed by the team in the recent months explicitly for this installation in Toronto, Canada. We will post more on about our technology soon which will also be made available under a free license.

We have released an updated and comprehensive version of our Stereoscope Creation Tools for Mac OS X leveraging the Mac's built-in Quartz Composer technology and giving you the opportunity to easily create advanced imagery and animations, test it with a 3D simulator and convert it to our Blinkenlights Movie format for later submission.

We are also planning to release an enhanced framework for animations and games (!) for the cross-platform Processing and Java programming languages soon. Stay tuned!

Stereoscope moves on. We finally distributed and installed all the lamps and dimmers to all the floors in both towers of Toronto City Hall and we are also installing the final pieces of our internal network. This means we are entering an extensive and pretty tough debugging phase.

Currently this means a lot of running around and testing and mostly work at night. It's a pretty exhausting job and the amount of work seems to be endless. If you live in Toronto you can already take a peek while run our tests on the facade. But keep in mind it doesn't look very nice until we have squashed all the remaining bugs.