OpenBeacon Blinkenlights

OpenBeacon Blinkenlights project
For the most recent Blinkenlights Stereoscope installation in Toronto, Canada, an OpenBeacon based technology was used. This page shall describe technical backgrounds of software and hardware used in this project.

In Torornto, 960 windows were lit up individually in two seperate buildings and the installation of wired connections needed to be avoided due to maintainability. Hence, a wireless setup seemed appropriate and as OpenBeacon technique is easy to handle, cheap to build and uses an ISM band, it perfectly fit our needs.

On each of the 36 floors, a wireless sending device was installed and hooked up to a Ethernet LAN, called the Wireless Matrix Control Unit. Each one of these controlled 22 or 30 lamps, respectively.

To each lamp, a Wireless Dimmer was attached which was configured to a specific pixel position in the global matrix so it knew when to blink.

Schematics and PCB layout files for the dimmers are released under a Creative Commons license.

Some impressions are available at flickr.com.

Credits
Hardware and software design for OpenBeacon based solutions is done by Milosch Meriac and Brita Meriac. Blinkenlights specific adaptions were done by Daniel Mack.