Machine 6: Westend Pumphouse Wall-o-Tetris

So Westend Pumphouse has a very interesting little wall made of recycled milk bottles and rio. The siren song of its clean yet messy lines is calling me. To serve my drinking and nerding needs I'll be attending games night Wednesdays, turning this wall into a big blocky screen. You'll find my progress on this blog tagged with 'Machine 6'.

The idea is simple; turn the wall-o-milk into a display. Initially, this will be used for Tetris and then a kinetic sculpture encouraging patrons to interact with it. My goal is to do this as cheaply as possible without impacting the look of the thing.


What on earth am I talking about? 

This kind of thing

Played on this thing

Nerdly Details

An installed video wall this size would be well over $12k and would still suck at certain jobs. Some details on the wall-o-milk as it sits:

• The wall forms a rather dishy matrix of 86x30 squares
• Each square is about 12.5mm per side
• Total number of pixels is a little over 2500
• Overall size is 10ish by 3ish metres

Ideas

1. Tetris, because Al can't build me a giant Tetris screen and just use it as a wall
2. Add control via Wiimote
3. Add control via Kinect 
4. Facebook integration, if you check in to facebook @ the Pumphouse it throws your name in blocky text, up in lights
5. Competitive Kinect controlled Tetris
6. Gif/Retro slideshow
7. Etch-a-sketch using an old Wacom tablet I have somewhere
8. DMX Integration (good for gigs)
9. Maybe throw in a Breakout type game

Plan of Attack

What follows in my braindump of what needs doing. Probably limited interest to anyone that is not me. 

1. Get permission
   Yep, Al is excited
2. Trial SMD 5050 in the base of a few bottle to see if it will work.
   Done, it does
3. Settle upon type of WS2801 based RGB LED
   Ordered a few different types to trial. Waiting
4. Order enough for a matrix big enough to get Tetris up and running
   Main game board is 10*20 with a second display, for next block et al of, say, 16*7 (312, but will  order 350)
   Order will be 14th of August with setup early in September
5. Get the Simple Tetris Clone compiling and understood.
   1st of August
6. Code an SPI emulator in Python. 
7. I don't want to do the uglier bits of prototyping in the Pumphouse if I can avoid it. An SPI emulator would be bloody useful for heaps of things.
   8th of August
8. Port to the Arduino
   15th of August
9. Etch-a-sketch with results posted through to Facebook (upon request)
   5th of September
10. Breakout clone coding
    End of September
11. Build out wall so the whole thing can be lit
    Depends a bit on funding, but hopefully ordering in September
12. Kinect control and two player mode
    Will start on the code towards the end of August, I have no experience with this device, but looking at the SDK most of the heavy lifting has already been done. 
13. DMX integration
    Prior to December

I discovered an interesting site while I was looking up a reference for SPI. The acronym may refer to 'sock puppet investigations', which is a hilarious name for a fairly serious thing.

Whato, Mackintosh