Flaschen Taschen

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Noisebridge Logo FlaschenTaschen.jpg

What's the project?

FlaschenTaschen is a 10’ by 9’ (3m x 2.75m) video display made out of clear glass bottles, milk crates, RGB LED strings (with a total of 1575 LEDs), and a controller board. Each bottle is capped with a single addressable RGB LED. The bottoms of the bottles act as lenses for the emitted light. The project has a German name as homage to c-base’s Matelights project. After seeing Matelights at Chaos Computer Congress, we were inspired to build a similar project at Noisebridge to present at the 2016 Maker Faire.

Another inspirational build is the Muro de botellas project.

Our goal was to have it completed for Maker Faire 2016 to be shown as part of our booth and we were two weeks ahead of schedule. After the MakerFaire, the display will be permanently installed within Noisebridge and possibly made available for events.

Our code and hardware that drives up to 16 LED strips from a Raspberry Pi is on Flaschen-Taschen github. We only need 9 strips in this project, one for each crate column. The update rate is up to 160fps!

Ft-pi-breakout.jpg The breakout board, driving up to 16 SPI LED strips.

Here is the first view of the completed project

FlaschenTaschen-2016-05-06.jpg

Showing the Plasma written By Carl - Find the code for this demo here https://github.com/cgorringe/ft-demos

Network protocol

The network protocol is quite simple: essentially send a PPM picture (P6) in a UDP packet to ft.noise:1337.

For instance, try the following all in the comfort of you shell (in bash, to be precise, that conveniently provides the /dev/udp pseudo-path):

 bash$ jpegtopnm myimage.jpg | pnmscale -xysize 45 35 > /dev/udp/ft.noise/1337

(There are also two additional protocols that can be enabled on the server-side: OpenPixelControl and PixelPusher).

We added an extension to the PPM format that allows to set an (x/y)-offset and a stacking-layer, see details on github.

There are sample utilities in the repository to send and scroll arbitrary images (including animated gifs), videos or text. There is a C++ class that you can use right away to send images to FlaschenTaschen including a couple of examples. It is also extremely simple to write your own client in any language that supports networking (See protocols section in documentation).

See all the details here https://github.com/hzeller/flaschen-taschen

Current Mechanical Design Documentation

This .PDF file is the current drawing set. Please take a look.

https://noisebridge.net/images/9/96/Noisebridge_FlaschenTaschen_2016-0131_36x24.pdf

FlaschenTaschen 2016-0131 Cropped.jpg


Production Schedule

Due Date Event / Required Goals

2016-04-17 48 Show Ready crates complete

2016-04-22 Software and Electronics night!

2016-04-23 Crate build: Catch up day.

2016-04-24 54 Show Ready crates complete

2016-05-01 60 Show Ready crates complete

2016-05-08 FlaschenTaschen - Substantial Completion - All Show Ready crates completed, mounted, and stacked. Minor tweaks to construction allowed. Software/Hardware development continues if needed. Create list of final Tasks

2016-05-08 66 Show Ready crates complete

2016-05-15 FlaschenTaschen Final Completion <-- And we were done at 2016-05-06

2016-05-18 Pack FlaschenTaschen for Maker Faire

2016-05-19 MakerFaire Setup Day - Transport to San Mateo

2016-05-19 Pre Maker Faire 5MoF?

2016-05-20 MAKER FAIRE!!!

2016-05-22 Maker Faire Takedown and Transport home to NB

2016-05-28 Begin Install of FlaschenTaschen crates at Noisebridge.