Gregory's Server(Postscript: a few of us here on the Fedi worked this out from first principles after someone noticed that the lights on several buildings in their city were all blinking together. It was a great piece of detective work.)
|
16 comments
  @bouncinglime @futzle That sounds awesome. Itβs hard for me to find photos/videos of the finished piece; would you happen to have any?  @bouncinglime Wow this is so cool! I'd heard about some of your projects before but not this one. Wish I'd been there to see it!  @nyankat thanks! it was one of the coolest things I've ever been part of honestly π and yeah definitely one of those "you had to be there" types @futzle Thankyou for explaining this! I've tried to take photos of the Melbourne CBD skyline at night and noticed that many of the buildings have rooftop navigation lights in synch, a few switch with the same period but a different part of the cycle, and a few others appear to drift over time so they appear to harmonise sometimes but not at other times. @futzle This is a wonderful dive into something really interesting π Thank you I worked on systems which mass monitor extremely large amounts (>XX% of the total market in the US) of beacons. This synchronization caused issues (outages, slowness, downstream issues) at one point because they all happen at the same time in a geographic location, and a mass influx of updates come in then. It's quite interesting stuff and that is still one of the cooler projects I've built from the ground up :) @futzle  @futzle Very interesting thread! I can't help but wonder: if they have GPS, they not only sync but can also get coordinates of their location, ignoring height. So assuming resolution of <10meters and assuming buildings are usually >=5meters wide in any direction and have some space between them, wouldn't it be trivial to use the beacon's location as a seed to sync up all the lights of a building but ensure they are different from the beacons of the buildings next to them?  @jorgeyanesdiez I can't think of a way to do this without the beacon needing to have a copy of a map. Consider in a dense downtown: the corners of different skyscrapers may be across a street only 20 m wide but the buildings themselves fill a 200 m block. Closeness is actually the _opposite_ of what you want. |
@futzle hi yes hello I was part of an art project that made use of this idea and I think of it every time I see groups of blinky lights ^_^
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/966222131/straightedge-a-new-way-to-see-your-planet/description
we ended up building our own lights and controllers and firmware for it, mostly because they would also - about every 10 minutes - display the speed of a seismic wave thru that particular soil geology https://github.com/ArdentHeavyIndustries/straightedge-gps-firmware