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Breakfast's super-speed reactive electromagnetic display is 44,000 dots of promotional awesome (video)
TNT wanted to launch its new crime show Perception, in style, and we have to give it to 'em, this is pretty cool. Working with professional technological tinkerers, Breakfast, they created a 23 x 12 foot display made up of 44,000 electromagnetic dots. Imagine those ticker boards you see at train stations, jazzed up with a little modern flavor. The dots are white on one side, black on the other, and move at 15 times the speed of their typical rail-station counterparts -- giving a real-time effect. The installation is set up in Manhattan's Herald Square until July 29th, and is fully interactive. When pedestrians walk past, the board updates to reflect their movement, and this "silhouette" interacts with words and images on the screen. Extra sensory stimulation also comes from the noise the board makes, literally letting you hear your movements. If a picture paints a thousand words, then 44,000 dots in a video paints even more. Head past the break to see the beast in action, plus more details on how it was done.
Feedair Digital Ticker hands-on
Feedair is a USB-powered WiFi enabled digital ticker that will span emails and tweets (or anything else with an RSS Feed) to its old-school dot-matrix display. Controlled with an iOS or Android app, it's designed as an "unobtrusive display:" for those situations where you can keep a casual eye on a physical device or send messages to people who aren't au-fait with technology. Feeling it in the hand, it's machined from heavy aluminum and we could see this doubling as a paperweight for the right kind of office -- and a great way for your assistant to send you discreet messages during tedious meetings. Constructing a "vidget" (visual widget) is apparently very easy and the company's planning to court young developers to expand the capacity of the gear. Setting up the display to show Engadget's twitter feed took around 30 seconds, although in the process, the app froze out a few times, so it's not quite ready for prime-time just yet. The Feedair is expected to hit the shelves in March and cost around $50. Dana Murph contributed to this report.
SXSW: Game Perverts
At first glance that panel title sounds like a very special episode of Dateline NBC's "To Catch a Predator," but the subtitle makes it a bit clearer ... for some: "A Robot, a DS, and a dot-matrix printer menage a trois." This panel was all about hacking and homebrewing, and we saw some pretty cool stuff. Bob Sabiston's Nintendo DS animation project -- this is a homebrew kit that Bob began developing after sending Nintendo a letter explaining that he was a fairly decent programmer and engineer (he is - he wrote the rotoscoping software used for the animation in Richard Linklater's A Scanner Darkly) and they sent him a software development kit for the DS. His animation and painting program is one of the best apps we've ever seen on the DS, and even the artwork he's produced on it is very impressive. Rich LeGrand got into game robotics with the Game Boy Advance, because there is a fairly limitless supply of hardware available on eBay at around $20 a pop. He reverse-engineered a robotics tool for the GBA called the Xport, which he sells through his company Charmed Labs, that lets you program and build a robot around your handheld (most people use Lego for the robot exoskeleton). He has also very successfully not been sued by Nintendo. Paul Slocum took an old Epson LQ500 dot-matrix printer and reversed engineered a box that lets him program and play music through it by changing the speeds and strengths that the pins strike the paper. It really has to be heard to be believed (it's part of the song - former dot-matrix users will hear it right away). He also uses an Atari 2600 with a modified cartridge to generate drums and "bleep" sounds. Pretty impressive stuff. We lovingly retitled this panel "How to hack up your precious hardware," but now we're thinking about cracking something open and giving it a whirl. We just wish we'd kept those old dot-matrix printers.
How to make a dot-matrix LED display
Instructables has posted a step-by-step guide to creating your very own dot-matrix display out of not much more than a collection of LEDs, a few wires, some resistors, and a microcontroller. The guy behind the project is hoping to sell a few pre-made kits, which will probably be the best option for those that feel a little lost staring at the board layouts and the lines of code required to get the display to show the letter "b". For some reason we feel a sense of empowerment after glancing at the guide -- then again, that feeling could just as easily be our inner child, urging us to build one and send rude messages to people across the room.
