Another exhibit for the Berlin Museum of Technolgy will be a visualization of packet routing in networks. A large wall will show a network of nodes and edges, where the connections (edges) are formed by lines of FlipDots. When the visitors send data over the network there will be a lot of optical and acoustical feedback. 🙂

 

We plan to use more than 1000 dots that are connected with different RS485 bus segments and controlled by a bunch of PSoC 4 microcontrollers. Capacitive sensors will be used for user input and a lot of RGB LEDs provide visual output. The whole scene will be controlled by a python application using the networkx modules.

Pictures will be posted here soon.