January 2004
Intermediate to advanced
348 pages
13h 33m
English
Content preview from Hardware Hacking Projects for Geeks
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Chapter 8, How to Hack a Building-Size Display
Project Demo
After you’ve set up the system you’ve decided to build, carefully apply
power and load one of the Blinkenlights movies. You can see a desktop
system running in Figure 8-25.
And, as Figure 8-26 shows, having a whole building lit up with animated
movies can be very impressive.
Wireless Extensions
One of the most time-consuming tasks when setting up a large
building is running the wires to each lamp. With some addi-
tional hacking, it is possible to use low-cost wireless links to
eliminate the thousands of meters of wire.
A single transmitter attached to the control PC can broadcast
one frame of data 25 times per second. Each receiver has a
unique address and looks for its state (either on or off) for that
frame of data. At the end of the transmission, all of the receiv-
ers make their state change. Each receiver needs a strong signal
from the transmitter connected to the control PC. An easy way
to accomplish this is to place the control PC and transmitter in
front of the building windows at street level, therefore ensuring
line of sight to each receiver. An overview of this idea is shown
in Figure 8-27.
Figure 8-25: Desktop system LEDs
Figure 8-26: Large-scale system in action
Channel Coder/Decoder
A company called RadioTronix has
a nice application note on channel
coding (http://www.radiotronix.com/ ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.