Ligts on, Lights out

Went to the Half Machine to help out with the LED boxes to get them wired up for use on Roskilde Festival in summer.

The display boxes were fitted standard power and data connectors for daisy chaining units. Internally the boxes each have one power supply providing current for four PCBs, each controlling 4x8 pixels. Pixel data is shifted from one board to the next via a ribbon cable. In their original stadium scoreboard configuration, similar ribbon cables simply connected the last PCB from one box to the first one in the next. The new design employs plain CAT5 cables with two RJ45 connectors on each box to make daisy chaining units easy regardless of how the stacks of displays are arranged.


Today was also Lights Out day, some kind of energy conservation awareness thing where people were supposed to switch off their lights between 8 and 9pm. To promote the event, billboards and posters in town featured some sort of demented panda creature inside a lightbulb shape, which really made no sense to me. But then again I don't watch TV so I don't know what ads they might have run.

In any case I think the event probably misfired. Officials from the municipal power supply did not registe any noticable drop in power consumption, and indeed the street lights remained on in all the outer town districts as well as in many homes in midtown where also most of the shops had left their bright street facing commercial signage on, so the net effect didn't feel very dark at all. Police had supposedly upped their presence to guard against mischief in the dark which wasn't.

However, the flagstones were still damp from afternoon rain which made for a few dozen good pictures with interesting, somewhat different and moody light scapes than the usual plain looking copenhagen.