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The most unhinged video wall, made out of Chromebooks

varun.ch

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Re: The most unhinged video wall, made out of Chromebooks

#31

Post by ashirviskas »

Cool! I did a similar thing with 4x4 tablets, after connecting all 16 of them to ADB and a single host I was able to automate most of the stuff. The I just created 16 virtual screens on sway with 16 VNC clients and streamed it all over Wi-Fi as a test, but Wi-Fi worked so well that I did not look for more efficient solutions.

For that period my PC had 19 displays, 17 of them over VNC and it was glorious. I could either do something on all of them, or dedicate each for a different purpose/program (music, htop, calendar, clock, ssh sessions)

Though dealing with all the hardware was quite annoying - some throttled, some had connectivity issues, others batteries would not hold charge and so on.

Re: The most unhinged video wall, made out of Chromebooks

#32

Post by mos_6502 »

>Now, I’m not entirely sure why this works so well, but I came up with a ridiculous solution by accident […]

>This means that the slowest computers hold back the fastest computers […]

It works so well because you’ve optimized the system’s design with respect to its bottleneck. Check out the theory of constraints :)

Re: The most unhinged video wall, made out of Chromebooks

#33

Post by preinheimer »

greggman25 wrote: post #9

I worked at Google when Chromebook shipped. They put out a call for decorations for the lobby and I proposed something similar to this but they said "no" :( Maybe because I asked for 40-64 machines :P I would not have tried to sync video though. Instead I'd have made time based animations and use the network the synchronize the clocks. you can see an example here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64TcBiqmVko It's 8 ma…

The author tried, but the clocks wouldn’t stay in sync. It’s in a sidenote expandable section.

> Unfortunately, these Chromebooks could not reliably keep track of time within milliseconds of each other, so this method didn't work for us.

Re: The most unhinged video wall, made out of Chromebooks

#34

Post by hoc »

i-am-gizm0 wrote: post #26
varun_ch wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you! We haven’t figured out what to play on it yet actually - I think the plan is to build out all the tools so that our school can create and upload their own videos (eg. montages of students work - this is in the Design workshop after all) to display on the screen. It could be self-service even after we graduate in June.

I think a very wide game of Pong would be fun!

We did something like that with an Amiga bouncing ball demo (on linux or Macs) back in the day (two decades ago, probably)

I think it was using a wide master screen that the terminals connected to via vnc, displaying different parts of the master screen. Only three or four screens wide, though, and not optimized for user interaction. But a live app nonetheless.

Re: The most unhinged video wall, made out of Chromebooks

#37

Post by sandreas »

Wanna see a great video wall out of reverse engineered iPod Nano 6 displays and learn something about reverse engineering along the way?

There is a video series from Mikes Electric Stuff from 11 (!) years ago, which is fantastic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TedIzmguP0

Re: The most unhinged video wall, made out of Chromebooks

#39

Post by simondotau »

preinheimer wrote: post #33
greggman25 wrote: post #9

I worked at Google when Chromebook shipped. They put out a call for decorations for the lobby and I proposed something similar to this but they said "no" :( Maybe because I asked for 40-64 machines :P I would not have tried to sync video though. Instead I'd have made time based animations and use the network the synchronize the clocks. you can see an example here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64TcBiqmVko It's 8 ma…

The author tried, but the clocks wouldn’t stay in sync. It’s in a sidenote expandable section. > Unfortunately, these Chromebooks could not reliably keep track of time within milliseconds of each other, so this method didn't work for us.

I feel like this deserves a deep dive of its own. Were the clocks drifting substantially over a reasonable time period between syncs (e.g. 24 hours)? Was SNTP not acting reliably? Did they try hosting a local time server?
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