BlinkenArea
| Website | http://www.blinkenarea.org/ |
|---|---|
| Contact | E-Mail: arne@blinkenarea.org
Jabber: ArneRossius@jabber.ccc.de DECT (during 31C3): 2082 |
| Description | The BlinkenArea will show many blinking objects made with lots and lots of LEDs. There will also be a soldering workshop and we will sell some construction kits at cost. The workshop will take place all day, every day, whenever there is someone at the BlinkenArea who can answer any questions you might have. |
| Members | Arne |
| Projects | create project |
| Self-organized Sessions | create self-organized session |
| Subassembly of | Hardware Hacking Area |
| Tags | soldering, workshop, led, electronics, hardware hacking |
| Registered on | 28 November 2014 00:40:39 |
| Location for self-organized sessions | yes |
| Self-organized session notes | There will be a soldering workshop which takes place whenever one of us is available at the BlinkenArea (like last year). |
| Other assemblies by tags... | |
| Location | , |
The BlinkenArea is a project group of people who like to build blinking objects. Some of our projects are miniature replicas of the Blinkenlights project and other buildings used as dot matrix screens. Our members are artists, hardware hackers, software hackers or usually a combination of the above ;-).
If you want to join us for the congress, please send an e-mail to <arne@blinkenarea.org>.
BlinkenArea at 31C3
The BlinkenArea will show many small blinking objects at the congress and also sell construction kits for some of them. If you like, you can solder your kit during the congress in our all-day, every-day soldering workshops. Everyone from a complete novice (including children) to a seasoned soldering expert is welcome. Unfortunately we won't have as many soldering irons as last time, so if you have your own soldering iron available, please bring it if you want to attend our workshop. A loan of your soldering iron for other participants to use would be greatly appreciated.
General Information on Kits and BlinkenMovies
BlinkenMovies (animations for BlinkenArea projects) can be created with Blimp or with your own programs and scripts (follow the links to the file formats below for details on the file structure). MCUF streams can be generated from existing BlinkenMovies with "BlinkenSend" from the BlinkenLib suite of console tools. MCUF streams are usually sent via UDP, you can output them to a serial port with "BlinkenOutput", also part of BlinkenLib.
The LED matrix kits use the BlinkenPlus firmware. This firmware supports playing animations from an MMC, SD or SDHC card formatted with FAT16 or FAT32 (the FAT12 filesystem on cards up to 32 MB is not supported). In addition, an MCUF stream can be fed to the UART, which is displayed when no SD card is inserted. The firmware also outputs an MCUF stream of all displayed frames (regardless of their source, including error messages) to the UART, which can be fed into other projects (if they have the same resolution).
Supported file formats on the SD card:
- BIN - binary, no grayscales (8 colors for RGB projects).
- BBM - Binary BlinkenMovie, up to 256 grayscales (16 Mi colors for RGB projects), but BlinkenPlus will convert to 8 grayscales (512 colors) before displaying.
- BLM - BlinkenLights Movie, simple ASCII text files, no grayscales (8 colors for RGB projects).
- BML - Blinkenlights Markup Language, XML-based, up to 256 grayscales (16 Mi colors for RGB projects), but BlinkenPlus will convert to 8 grayscales (512 colors) before displaying.
Have a look at the kit instructions on where to place the files on the SD card, as the location varies with each kit. This also means that you can use the same SD card for different kits in turn without having to move or delete files.
BlinkenArea Kits
The following kits will be available at 31C3. Every kit contains all needed parts, the PCB and printed instructions. You can solder your kit at the BlinkenArea if you like.
| Picture | Name/Description | Difficulty/Price |
|---|---|---|
|
AntiKippenLights-Atmel (AKL-Atmel) Small heart consisting of 18 red 5 mm LEDs which display several animations. Includes a pre-programmed ATtiny2313 controller. Requires two AA batteries (not included). |
Very easy SMD: no 10,– € |
|
AntiKippenLights-Mini (AKL-Mini) Small heart consisting of 18 red SMD LEDs which display several animations. Includes a pre-programmed ATtiny2313 controller and a CR2032 button cell battery. |
Easy SMD: yes 10,– € |
|
ATmega168 Board with 96x60 Pixel LCD A general purpose AVR controller development board (Arduino compatible). The example application is written in C (avr-gcc) and has a Game-of-Life mode and a MCUF stream display mode. The example application how to send images and text to the LCD as well as controlling the backlight, polling the push-buttons and reading from the UART.
|
Easy SMD: no 15,– € |
|
TicTacLights A very small BlinkenLights clone (resolution: 18 × 8 = 144 pixels, pixel aspect ratio: ~0.55) with orange LEDs that fits into a small TicTac box. It uses the BlinkenPlus firmware (capabilities listed below this table). It has a MicroSD card slot and pads for the UART (3 V level). Can be powered from USB or a single-cell lithium-ion battery (not included).
|
Advanced SMD: yes 25,– € |
|
TicTacLights Colour Same size as the TicTacLights, but with colour LED display (RGB LEDs). Very bright LEDs! It has a MicroSD card slot and pads for the UART (5 V level). Can be powered from USB or another 5 V power source capable of supplying at least 250 mA.
|
Very difficult SMD: yes 35,– € |
|
ArcadeMicro Colour An ARCADE clone (resolution: 26 × 20 = 520 pixels, pixel aspect ratio: 0.5) with very bright RGB LEDs. It uses the BlinkenPlus firmware (capabilities listed below this table). It has a full-size SD card slot and an RS232 port (D-Sub connector included). Can be powered from any 5 V source capable of delivering at least 900 mA, e.g. a USB3 port.
|
Advanced SMD: yes 75,– € |
| 300px | StreamSplitter Split one MCUF input stream (or files read from an SD card) into several smaller output streams. Useful for tiling several displays of identical kits (e.g. ArcadeMicro Colour). Can also be used as a master to supply a single MCUF stream, which will be displayed simultaneously by all connected displays.
|
Intermediate SMD: some 17,– € |
USB Cable
|
0,50 € |
