From the 12th of September 2001 to the 23th of February 2002 there was the worldwide biggest light-installation Blinkenlights at the Alexanderplatz in Berlin. Blinkenlights was developed and installed by the Chaos Computer Club for the 20th anniversary of the CCC. The installation was located in the Haus des Lehrers [house of the teacher], which was unused and should be reconstructed soon. Blinkenlights consisted of 8 floors with 18 windows each. Behind every window there was a single lamp on a self-made tripod. Each lamp was connected to the power source via a relay. If the relay switched on, the window pane became bright. In order to achieve the appropriate self-illuminated effect they have painted all windows with white color. The lamps had a capacity of 150W only. Thus they created a monochrome matrix with 8x18 pixels. Every single lamp was controled by a computer. At night animations where shown at the house. Further it was possible to play Pong via mobile phone or to show your own loveletter at the house. The software from Blinkenlights was published under GPL as FreeSoftware and is free available for everyone. Videos, software to create and play the Blinkenlights animations, dokumentations and reports you can find at the Blinkenlights websites. Blinkenlights was everywhere in the media and people were quite taken, even there were generally no good news about blocks of flats at this time. Around 1000 movies (approximately 300 of them loveletters) were created in the 5 months and 23 days running time of Blinkenlights and Die Toten Hosen made their video to "Was zählt" in the house. Blinkenlights caused quite a stir concerning the creative dealing with technology.

What is LittleLights?

LittleLights is a miniature reconstruction of Blinkenlights and is 100% compatible with the original Blinkenlights movies. It has the same funktions like Blinkenlights. You can call it and play Pong against the computer or a second caller. The loveletter funktion is implemented too, so it is possible to start via phone the loveletter movie, which has to be send in before. It can also be used as Winamp analyzer, news & status-information-display etc. More information about these features can be found in the appropriate chapters of the documentation. The basic hardware itself is identical with BlinkenLEDs [1], where 144 low-current LEDs are connected to 18 8bit shift-registers, which are controlled by a Standard PC with centronics-port. The LittleLights-hardware is controlled in exactly the same way, except that instead of LEDs an amplifier-PCB and 144 incandescent lamps are used. The miniature-house is 115cm high and the hardware (PC, PCBs, power-supply..) is fixed inside. In the meanwhile the project consists of a little heterogeneous network with 4 computers, which diposal a lot of functions and services. The software will be introduced and detailly descripted in the same named section. Blinkenlights was not only inspiration for LittleLights, after the installation at the Alexanderplatz further projects emerged, like Bushfire, Arcade, BlinkenMinni, BlinkenLEDs and a lot of other blinking projects.