What’s that?

Each year, alongside the introductory barbecue, Cover organizes the Committee Market. This is an event where all the committees of Cover present themselves to the new members. This year, CircuitRee was present for the first time (since the committee was founded in 2024). We had a little table with an LED matrix as a centerpiece, which people could interact with through a web interface.

The prototype

The idea

We were inspired by r/place, a social experiment on Reddit where users could place a pixel on a canvas every 5 minutes. We wanted to create a similar experience, but with a physical display.

The LED matrix was controlled by a Raspberry Pi connected to a crappy 10 year old router, which people had to connect to in order to access the interface for placing a pixel on the display. The initial idea was to host a server on an ESP32, but due to its weak processing power, we decided to go for a Raspberry Pi 4B with Vite+React+Typescript alongside Flask to interact with the pins. It sounds incredibly overkill, but it was the only way we could get it to work in time.

Of course, the project was not without its issues. Let me list a few:

  • People didn’t really bother connecting to the network due to them just looking around, so we had to do it for them. We resorted to giving them our own phones to interact with the display.
  • People drew inappropriate things on the display. We had to keep an eye on it at all times to prevent this.
  • I (Boyan) messed up the color packing in the protocol, so the colors were all wrong. We lost a lot of color depth because of this.

Despite that, we had a great time! We met a lot of new people and had some interesting conversations.

The vibe

Timelapse

We recorded a timelapse of the event. Check it out below! You may notice that a certain someone started using bots to draw stuff on it at one point.

Fair warning: it contains mild profanity (due to the sheer nature of the project 😆).

Click the arrow at your own risk! Timelapse of the event

Check out the code