blinkenleds: the small version of blinkenlights

In 2002 the CCC installed 144 spotlights behind each window of the "Haus des Lehrers" in Berlin. That turned the building into a huge 18 X 8 monochrome display. The project is called blinkenlights.
I decided to build my own little display when i saw the mini-version of blinkenlights, the blinkenleds

click the picture to see the final blinkenled installation (it's mounted upon our server at home and is reachable within our LAN)

hardware:

here is a list of the parts i bought from Reichelt:

20x MOS4094 schieberegister 5.60 euro
GS 16 IC-Sockel 16 polig 0.80 euro
2x H25PR100 Platine 100x100mm 2.20 euro
150 LED 5MM 2MA RT, Low-Current LEDs 13.50 euro
SVS5 Stromversorgungsstecker 0.17 euro
PSW 5 Stromversorgungsstecker 5 1/4 zoll 0.56 euro
KUPFER 0,2MM, Lackdraht 115M 1.55 euro
AWG 28-14G 10M Flachbandkabel AWG28, 14pol 5.70 euro
and some box to put a europlatine in

A good description on how to solder the parts together is found here. the main work is to connect the LEDs with the plate. If you're not into soldering you can have a look at here
The 144 LEDs are controlled by the parallel port via the 18 shift-registers. Before you plug it in, be sure to check all contacts. here are some pics of the building stages:

software:

One can use the original protocol of the Blinkenlights project. I use the blib library written by Sven Neumann blib . I think the link is down by now, but you can download version 1.1.6 here.
I use the send-program in the test-folders after compiling and built some perlscripts around them. As the receiver (daemon) one can find a nice program "blinkenledd" based on the blib (and also for different layouts) written by Miriam Busch (here). To get it to work with my version of the blinkenlib i had to change the definitions of the BPacket. You can have a look on my altered version here
Here are some perl scripts i've written:
note: you will need a sender-program to send the packets to the daemon. i use the one in the testfolder of the original blib-library.
blinkenparser: download
you can pipe the output of some other programs to this script. the script will make moving text out of it and sends it to the daemon.
the letters are stored in a separate text-file like this
blinkenclock: download
this is just an analog clock for the blinkenleds. (kind of hard to read)

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