FByte Event

Auction / remembrance / party day at Glitchlabs

[Small pictures are linked to larger ones.]


Folks busily laying out items. Only a small fraction of the items made it down the hall from storage, but mostly the one-off type of stuff.

Several bidding stations were set up, many laptops showed up, and people got busy. As the day went on the laptop farm started to almost look like DefCon. Peeto [foreground] kept a close eye on the bidding server all day as people pounded the crap out of it.

I didn't bid on all that much and wound up winning a bit less; my best haul was probably the indicated oscilloscope.

As buyers got cashed out and descended on the storage area, things became *very* chaotic for a while.

Some "reverse engineering" type detail shots of the hanging LED tower in the main hangout space, including the serial interface suspended on its own wires up near the ceiling. Nice idea to use the triad of UV diodes to help provide a nice deep violet in addition to RGBA.

But it was more fun to try and see the tower's PWM rate by swinging the camera across the view at the right moment. Much faster than the 60 Hz purple Christmas lights in front of a nearby house that I had played with a month before, that simply light the red side on one half-cycle and the blue one on the other.

I also managed to do this with Wil's mini-Obelisk and see a couple of ghostly repeats of the persistence-of-vision image he was sending it.

The building itself is wonderfully crufty with lots of legacy weirdness everywhere, and there are plenty of visually intriguing little features all over the place.

Down the hatch! Scary monsters within!

Possibly the scariest of which is Tensor, which was doing its pixelated thing pretty much all day.

It's rather amusing when people swing in front of it.

Some Tensor pixels in a little more detail, aka "old skool" Colorblasts [I think]. Interesting how the colors are sprinkled through each block in a semi-random layout.

Carl running a more choreographed show using Tensor, a laser scanner, and various other stuff around the room. Sure, it's motion-blurred because it was very dark back in that corner. The only sharp things are a few dust particles in the laser sheet which effectively self-flashed once during the second-plus this was open.

While Carl performed, people sat there blinded by the light.

With this many loose nuts on the premises, you need a really big wrench!

_H* 080210