A short workshop report and instructions
Our trainer Arjan Scherpenisse was a part-time student at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy and graduated in July with an installation consisting of 72 centrally-controlled VGA monitors, using self-built electronics. While his current passion lies in combining the virtual with the physical using electronics, his background is in software engineering and Open Source software.
The workshop is based on this VGA box and the participants could learn how to build one themselves and re-create all the fabulous imagery.
As most of our workshops it started with soldering the components to the micro-controller (see the workshop hand-out) and creating images or text on your computer. By the way, all of our workshops a great way to learn soldering and learn more about electronics, micro-controllers and necessary equipment.
After a few hours of soldering, tweaking and drilling holes in the plastic box (where the soldered boards have to go in), the results were fantastic! And one team (Jeroen Holthuis and Evert Hilhorst) used an Arduino to add even more output signaling to the micro-controller. It looked great. See the pictures and do check out the PDF, with this hand-out you can build one at home. You also need the open source code and other documentation that you can download here.
Keep an eye on our website as we might plan another workshop in autumn.
