Nitpicking
Blinkenlights isn’t a german word it’s pseudo german for Blinklicht originating from
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blinkenlights#:~:text=on%20the...
But the Chaos Computer Club built light installations called
>The Jargon File also mentions that German hackers had in turn developed their own versions of the blinkenlights poster, in broken English:[1]
ATTENTION
This room is fullfilled mit special electronische equippment.
Fingergrabbing and pressing the cnoeppkes from the computers is allowed for die experts only!
So all the "lefthanders" stay away and do not disturben the brainstorming von here working intelligencies.
Otherwise you will be out thrown and kicked anderswhere!
Also: please keep still and only watchen astaunished the blinkenlights.I would also use "die" instead of "das* for Blinkslights, since it's plural.
@croes I was thinking the same thing (knowing no german, but having a hunch).
And the CCC project was a whole building.
For his example, I was expecting a whole cage with some tricked out lights, maybe some smoke effects (I can see new colo signs being updated "no cardboard,no smoke machines allowed"), a sub-woofer playing some chiptunes, etc.
I wrote "I love you" on the CCC Blinkenlights in Berlin to my then girlfriend, who has been my wife now for 20 years. The most romantic thing I ever did :)
I saw a version of that sign a very long time ago in a government lab at my high school summer intern job, attached to a PDP-11 that came with blinkenlights.
First time I saw it was 1981 on the front of a DEC-10
obvious? that's the fun of it.
The linked article begins with "[Blinkenlights] Probably the only German word I know"
Ironically the author likely knows some actual German words like Schadenfreude and Kindergarten.
The list is quite long: <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_German_ex...>
> Now you need to remember this is not a metal panel it is a 1.6mm thick fibre-glass one, it does the job, but it wont take much abuse like a metal one will and flexes a little when handling it.
That's when you design in a PC board stiffener. These are just pieces of metal, U-channel, L-channel, or solid bar, to add some structural strength. Cheap and easy, but rarely seen in hobbyist work. Any board with buttons or knobs or connectors unsupported for more than a few inches should have some stiffening. You have to allow space for stiffening bars when designing the board, and you need to place screw holes.
> Yes, I remembered now, I had almost 200 really crappy PIC16F1782 chips, left over from an update for one of my clients
> First problem there are not enough GPIO pins on the 28-pin PIC to drive 128 LED’s, plus an address line, plus a serial receive pin, minimum GPIO’s for that is 24 (16×8 LED scan matrix)+4(address)+1(RXD) = 29. A simple solution is to add two 74HC595 shift registers to increase the outputs by 16 at the expense of 4 pins to control them.
Wouldn't the simple solution be just to split the matrix in half and throw second PIC in there? Or just make 1U panels instad of 2U?
Also the PIC is rated to sink/source 25 mA so you could have skipped the led driver transistors, making the boards even simpler.
Hearing 'blinkenlights' reminds me of the still very much up 'towel.blinkenlights.nl' telnet server which plays an ASCII art rendition of Star Wars if you dial into it.
There's a joke if you have IPV6 connectivity where if you use IPV4 it says it has full colour support but if you do... well, it doesn't!
Came to post the same..!
Someone wrote about it on Medium: https://medium.com/nerd-for-tech/telnetting-watching-star-wa...
Nice bit of nostalgia for me.
This story reminded me of the "BeBox" [0] PowerPC computer from the 1990's, which had Blinkenlights on its front bezel.
(It ran the very cool "BeOS" operating system[1], which was eventually ported to Mac, then x86.)
And a FOSS re-implementation of which is still alive and in active development. The project recently released beta 5 -- it's very nearly ready for version 1.0 and now runs GNOME Epiphany, Firefox, LibreOffice and more.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/09/testing_haiku_beta_5/
I liked how this project used "reverse mount LEDs" [1] which are perhaps not known to everyone.
It means that instead of being mounted to a PCB and having the light shine "up" from the board, it instead shines down between the solder points, and you arrange for the PCB to have a hole there. It means all the components are on one side, but the light is emitted on the back which can be clean and/or have cool silkscreens etc. Nice!
[1]: http://www.kingbrightusa.com/category.asp?catalog_name=LED&c...
You could perhaps make it play a subtle background sound like the noise WOPR makes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4vWTzs_bp4
I read this phrase: "I had almost 200 really crappy PIC16F1782 chips" and remembered my university days when we were programming the PIC16C84 and thought that this was a very good chip (at the time) :-)
Many, many years ago, I saw a copy of Das Blinkenlights delivered on a sheet of paper with the documentation of a brand new S/32 IBM system. Certainly a highlight of my IT career!
I'm planning to do something similar, but using addressable RGB LEDs (like WS2811, also known as neopixel).
They are simple to work with. Each LED has 4 connections: GND, +5V, DATA IN and DATA OUT. Each LED grabs the first 24 bits of the data stream (8 bits for Red, Green and Blue) and sends the rest on DATA OUT for the next LED.
Anyone using todbot blink(1)? Also a fun USB RGB.
I can't wait until gaming builds start adopting this trend. I want to see a high end gaming rig but it looks like a server from a 1990s sci-fi movie.
The effect is really cool. I like the idea of visualizing data flowing through work systems like this. I think I'll go for 3D-printed or laser-cut panels instead though - would work out cheaper. Thanks :)
I like the KISS implementation of the ascii2dec function ;)
This looks very much like a Connection Machine. A red LED would light up when its corresponding processor was active.
No, IIRC, on a Connection Machine, a light blinks when the corresponding CPU is active. A LED which is on or off means the CPU is not working.
I am quite convinced that they chose to do it this way because the way you describe it – the obvious way – did not look cool enough.
> Working C Code below for those in the know.
It would be nice to explicitly attach a (FOSS) license to this. (Apologizes if there is one and I just missed it)
Like they used to say in Art school during critiques "go big! I'd like to see what this looks like bigger"
Actual German would be something like "die Blinkenlichten". "Blinkenlichten" was the form used in the original faux-German sign from which "blinkenlights" is said to derive. "Blinkenlights" is used in a faux-English sign that hung in some German computer installations: "Please keep still and only watchen astaunished the blinkenlights."
See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blinkenlights http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/B/blinkenlights.html
Die Blinklichter, if anything.
Not to be confused with the Justine Tunney's debugger named Blinkenlights: https://justine.lol/blinkenlights/
NICHT FÜR DER GEFINGERPOKEN UND MITTENGRABEN
I would feel so productive! Well done.
Very cool. This scratches several itches. What data is this displaying? Are you tailing syslog and writing it to a serial output? Do you have some status monitor that assigns meaning to the lights?
This doesn't look like a valid Show HN. It is an interesting blog post (without the Show HN prefix), though!
> Show HN is for something you've made that other people can play with. HN users can try it out, give you feedback, and ask questions in the thread.
> Off topic: blog posts
I disagree, on the very same page it says:
> On topic: things people can run on their computers or hold in their hands. For hardware, you can post a video or detailed article. For books, a sample chapter is ok.
While it's posted on a blog, I would say it meets the criteria for having the video and write-up showing off the cool thing that has been built.
I think what that page is saying about blog posts is that you shouldn't post a Show HN as a 'look at this blog post I made about [some random topic]', as in when it's the blog post itself that you're showing off. It's not saying you can't post any blog post as a Show HN.
As stephen_g pointed out, it's ok by the hardware exemption in https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html.
But I like the title Das Blinkenlights so have changed it anyway. @boznz: I hope that's ok!
(The post is currently at #3 on the frontpage so there's not much need for it to be high on /show in any case.)
Oh wow, I never read that and thought Show HN was simply, "Look at this cool thing I did."
It basically is! but the rules provide a few guardrails.