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MIT Completes "Holy Grail of Hacks," Turns Green Building into a Game of Tetris

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Re: MIT Completes "Holy Grail of Hacks," Turns Green Building into a Game of Tetris

#21

Post by rje »

bhickey wrote: post #20
rje wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was part of the team that worked on this way back in the day, and it was a blast. It was a bunch of soldering, running wires, trying to debug all the issues, etc. And then everything came together and it just worked. Woz showing up was the icing on the cake, and it was definitely one of the highlights of my college career.

I was a middle-schooler and my parents took me to play. I recall a bug where if you rotated the square quickly enough it would travel upward. Someone (maybe Clara?) whipped out a patch and recompiled.

No idea who'd have done the patch, it was really a team effort. I forget the exact number, but there were 20+ contributors over the course of the project. And by the time it was up and running a lot of us were crashing due to the long hours. I only vaguely remember the first night it fired up, since I had gone home to sleep after a long shift and someone came back to tell me that it was finally working.

Awesome to hear from someone who got to play it!

Re: MIT Completes "Holy Grail of Hacks," Turns Green Building into a Game of Tetris

#23

Post by miwallac »

bhickey wrote: post #20
rje wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was part of the team that worked on this way back in the day, and it was a blast. It was a bunch of soldering, running wires, trying to debug all the issues, etc. And then everything came together and it just worked. Woz showing up was the icing on the cake, and it was definitely one of the highlights of my college career.

I was a middle-schooler and my parents took me to play. I recall a bug where if you rotated the square quickly enough it would travel upward. Someone (maybe Clara?) whipped out a patch and recompiled.

I created an account just for this: I dated Clara's sister for 7 years, and I still run into her brother occasionally, from the other side of the country.

Pointless post is pointless.

Re: MIT Completes "Holy Grail of Hacks," Turns Green Building into a Game of Tetris

#24

Post by dlaw »

jiggy2011 wrote: post #22

Were the building administrators in on this? Or was it really a "hack"? I'm assuming there must be some central computer controlling the lights, either than or they attached something to / modified each light switch?

The lights in the windows are custom fabbed PCBs, completely independent of the building lights.

Re: MIT Completes "Holy Grail of Hacks," Turns Green Building into a Game of Tetris

#27

Post by lovelyworld »

Dove wrote: post #13

That's very cool and playful, but "Holy grail of hacks" seems a bit overwrought. I don't want to be a naysaying jerk, and the whole thing is cool, but . . . is this harder than it looks?

I've seen one of the modules. There seems to be wirelessly controlled custom PCBs in each window.

Re: MIT Completes "Holy Grail of Hacks," Turns Green Building into a Game of Tetris

#28

Post by mturmon »

Dove wrote: post #13

That's very cool and playful, but "Holy grail of hacks" seems a bit overwrought. I don't want to be a naysaying jerk, and the whole thing is cool, but . . . is this harder than it looks?

The Caltech Rose Bowl prank of 1984 seems much harder and had a greater audience.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_Rose_Bowl#Scoreboard_prank

They had to break in to the Rose Bowl stadium, design and build special boards to take over the scoreboard lights, and break back in to install the boards. The control of the board during the halftime break in the Rose Bowl game was done by RF link. This was in 1984, when hardware was much more finicky and expensive.

http://www.nytimes.com/1984/01/04/sports/sports-people-prank...

Re: MIT Completes "Holy Grail of Hacks," Turns Green Building into a Game of Tetris

#29

Post by gsiener »

agwa wrote: post #2

This was done at Brown in 2000 (albeit in monochrome): http://techhouse.brown.edu/bastille/ Woz even showed up to play it: http://techhouse.brown.edu/bastille/photos/woz_play.jpg

Thanks, I was about to post this (my friend's laptop is the one they used for the controls). Go Brown!
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