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Das Blinkenlights

Das Blinkenlights

83 comments

·January 12, 2025

Got a boring server rack? Got a retro-computer project? Need some bling??

If you have a little electronics skill then you may want to make a few of these babies to let your server rack party like a 1970's mainframe.

Just a fun little project done over a couple of days at XMAS, and probably best not to install in the corporate server room!

croes

Nitpicking

Blinkenlights isn’t a german word it’s pseudo german for Blinklicht originating from

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blinkenlights#:~:text=on%20the...

But the Chaos Computer Club built light installations called

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Blinkenlights

fuzztester

>The Jargon File also mentions that German hackers had in turn developed their own versions of the blinkenlights poster, in broken English:[1]

    ATTENTION
    This room is fullfilled mit special electronische equippment.
    Fingergrabbing and pressing the cnoeppkes from the computers is allowed for die experts only!
    So all the "lefthanders" stay away and do not disturben the brainstorming von here working intelligencies.
    Otherwise you will be out thrown and kicked anderswhere!
    Also: please keep still and only watchen astaunished the blinkenlights.

graemep

That is funny (I do not know German but it still made me laugh) for exactly the same reason as the Blinkelights version - the similarities between German and English that make so many works almost recognisable.

wizzwizz4

I have never been able to track down what "cnoeppkes" is supposed to mean.

wongarsu

My guess is "Knöpfchen" (German for "little button"). The "chen" suffix is difficult to pronounce for English speakers, so it's replaced by the word "keys" (as in the buttons of a keyboard)

kemitchell

Кнопки (k-nope-key) is Russian for "buttons". Maybe related.

bananasbandanas

Definitely means buttons. Source: am German

jansan

I wrote "I love you" on the CCC Blinkenlights in Berlin to my then girlfriend, who has been my wife now for 20 years. The most romantic thing I ever did :)

boznz

In 1985 I made a similar panel which had 16 lights and mechanical switches and installed it in a rack in an operations center in GCHQ just to make it a bit more colorful. One day I came back from leave and the boss was really mad at me as they had been showing around some VIP, who stopped at the panel and asked the area director what it did. As all the technicians had been evacuated for the tour, nobody had a clue.

danielbln

I would also use "die" instead of "das* for Blinkslights, since it's plural.

Over2Chars

@croes I was thinking the same thing (knowing no german, but having a hunch).

And the CCC project was a whole building.

For his example, I was expecting a whole cage with some tricked out lights, maybe some smoke effects (I can see new colo signs being updated "no cardboard,no smoke machines allowed"), a sub-woofer playing some chiptunes, etc.

not2b

I saw a version of that sign a very long time ago in a government lab at my high school summer intern job, attached to a PDP-11 that came with blinkenlights.

gonzo

First time I saw it was 1981 on the front of a DEC-10

boznz

PDP-10 Was awesome. There is a nice version of the console you can buy here => https://hackaday.io/project/170111-pidp-10

i5heu

Also Kindergarten is German :)

null

[deleted]

emmelaich

obvious? that's the fun of it.

unkeen

The linked article begins with "[Blinkenlights] Probably the only German word I know"

Sharlin

Ironically the author likely knows some actual German words like Schadenfreude and Kindergarten.

Animats

> Now you need to remember this is not a metal panel it is a 1.6mm thick fibre-glass one, it does the job, but it wont take much abuse like a metal one will and flexes a little when handling it.

That's when you design in a PC board stiffener. These are just pieces of metal, U-channel, L-channel, or solid bar, to add some structural strength. Cheap and easy, but rarely seen in hobbyist work. Any board with buttons or knobs or connectors unsupported for more than a few inches should have some stiffening. You have to allow space for stiffening bars when designing the board, and you need to place screw holes.

benbristow

Hearing 'blinkenlights' reminds me of the still very much up 'towel.blinkenlights.nl' telnet server which plays an ASCII art rendition of Star Wars if you dial into it.

There's a joke if you have IPV6 connectivity where if you use IPV4 it says it has full colour support but if you do... well, it doesn't!

Insanity

Came to post the same..!

Someone wrote about it on Medium: https://medium.com/nerd-for-tech/telnetting-watching-star-wa...

Nice bit of nostalgia for me.

f1shy

      >> unsigned char ascii2dec( unsigned char data) // expecting a hexedecimal num 0..F anything else returns 0
  {
  if(data=='0') return 0;
  if(data=='1') return 1;
  if(data=='2') return 2;
  if(data=='3') return 3;
  if(data=='4') return 4;
  if(data=='5') return 5;
  if(data=='6') return 6;
  if(data=='7') return 7;
  if(data=='8') return 8;
  if(data=='9') return 9;
  if(data=='A') return 10;
  if(data=='B') return 11;
  if(data=='C') return 12;
  if(data=='D') return 13;
  if(data=='E') return 14;
  if(data=='F') return 15;
  if(data=='a') return 10;
  if(data=='b') return 11;
  if(data=='c') return 12;
  if(data=='d') return 13;
  if(data=='e') return 14;
  if(data=='f') return 15;
  return 0; // default/error
}

I could probably think about a little bit shorter function for that ;)

boznz

Boz here and guilty on all charges. There are plenty of errors if you look hard when sober. There's professional grade coding, then there is coding for hobby projects which blink LED's, when you're drinking beers and listening to rock music in a big shed with a mate.

On another note, somebody asked me to make 30 panels using an RP2040 which I will put up on my site when ready, price will actually be less due to qty. as a side note he did want me to use the RP2350 but nobody has any in stock yet.

f1shy

I said that tongue in cheek. I’m unable to pull the project you did. A brain fart happens to anybody.

rad_gruchalski

Also the default case returns 0, same as data==‘0’. Good luck figuring out if there was an error.

LysPJ

This story reminded me of the "BeBox" [0] PowerPC computer from the 1990's, which had Blinkenlights on its front bezel.

(It ran the very cool "BeOS" operating system[1], which was eventually ported to Mac, then x86.)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeBox

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeOS

lproven

And a FOSS re-implementation of which is still alive and in active development. The project recently released beta 5 -- it's very nearly ready for version 1.0 and now runs GNOME Epiphany, Firefox, LibreOffice and more.

https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/09/testing_haiku_beta_5/

endemic

The BeBox is my holy grail of retrocomputing! Had to settle for a partition on my x86 machine. Loved BeOS back in the day.

deltarholamda

That you felt the need to explain these makes me feel really, really old. (And you did need to explain it; it's practically Elder Lore at this point.)

It's like explaining to young people that we used to have to pay per message for SMS, or that only one person could be on the Internet at a time at your house.

Now if you'll excuse me, I see some suspicious looking clouds I need to go yell at.

unwind

I liked how this project used "reverse mount LEDs" [1] which are perhaps not known to everyone.

It means that instead of being mounted to a PCB and having the light shine "up" from the board, it instead shines down between the solder points, and you arrange for the PCB to have a hole there. It means all the components are on one side, but the light is emitted on the back which can be clean and/or have cool silkscreens etc. Nice!

[1]: http://www.kingbrightusa.com/category.asp?catalog_name=LED&c...

mewse-hn

Mechanical keyboards have moved this direction (lighting on the back of the pcb, through a hole) so that the LEDs don't physically interfere with the hot-swappable key switches.

aryehof

Many, many years ago, I saw a copy of Das Blinkenlights delivered on a sheet of paper with the documentation of a brand new S/32 IBM system. Certainly a highlight of my IT career!

zaxomi

I'm planning to do something similar, but using addressable RGB LEDs (like WS2811, also known as neopixel).

They are simple to work with. Each LED has 4 connections: GND, +5V, DATA IN and DATA OUT. Each LED grabs the first 24 bits of the data stream (8 bits for Red, Green and Blue) and sends the rest on DATA OUT for the next LED.

bitwize

Actual German would be something like "die Blinkenlichten". "Blinkenlichten" was the form used in the original faux-German sign from which "blinkenlights" is said to derive. "Blinkenlights" is used in a faux-English sign that hung in some German computer installations: "Please keep still and only watchen astaunished the blinkenlights."

See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blinkenlights http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/B/blinkenlights.html

bipson

Die Blinklichter, if anything.

edoceo

Anyone using todbot blink(1)? Also a fun USB RGB.

https://blink1.thingm.com/

jsvaughan

You could perhaps make it play a subtle background sound like the noise WOPR makes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4vWTzs_bp4

NKosmatos

I read this phrase: "I had almost 200 really crappy PIC16F1782 chips" and remembered my university days when we were programming the PIC16C84 and thought that this was a very good chip (at the time) :-)