blinkenlight
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Metalab wires its Blinkenwall to run from Commodore 64, gives no word on the obligatory Tetris port (video)
We've seen some ambitious Blinkenwalls in our time. Nearly all of the attention is unsurprisingly focused on the wall, however, and not on the often clever hardware and software behind it. Vienna's Metalab wants to shift the limelight by kicking it old school. Instead of the thoroughly modern Arduino and Fonera hotspot that normally light up Metalab's 45-block glass wall, the team's Blinken64 project swaps in a Commodore 64 with a cassette drive and the unusual Final Cartridge III feature extender. Getting lights to strobe requires dusting off more than just hardware -- all the animations have to be written in assembly-level MOS Technology 6510 code that even our nerdy parents might forget. The result you'll see in the video after the break is a far cry from the relatively easy, web-accessible hardware that normally powers such blinkenlight creations, but it's also a testament to how relevant classic technology can remain when it's in the right hands.
Cube made of 512 LEDs does 3D with calculus, not glasses (video)
No goofy active shutter glasses, no headache-inducing parallax barrier screens, no optical trickery here. This is a pure 3D display -- unfortunately done at a resolution of just 8 x 8 x 8. It's a hand-built LED cube created by Nick Schulze, powered by Arduino, and driven largely by Matlab. Yes, Matlab, an application you probably deleted less than three minutes after signing off on your calculus final. We can't help you find that installation disc again, but we can encourage you to enjoy the video of this 3D matrix of blinkenlights after the break, and you can get the full details on how to build your own at the other end of that source link.
