Testing the Rascal with the Greenway light blades

Here's a low quality video of a truly excellent event.

I'm working on a project to control the light blades on the Greenway in Boston through text messages. While I was filming the video with my phone, Dan was crouched in "The Vault," a concrete bunker under the Greenway plaza. We had a Rascal plugged into the light controller with a serial cable. Dan used a Python script I wrote to generate HTTP POSTs on my laptop. In theory, the POSTs are the same requests that we'll eventually receive from Twilio. (See this Rascal-and-Twilio tutorial for the details on how that works.) The Rascal parses the messages Dan sends and decides what show to play. The shows are still a bit of a mess, but the Rascal is working great.

I don't want to say too much more about what we have planned until it's closer to fruition, but I think it will be cool.

Below is a better still shot from Eric Kilby that gives a better idea of what the light blades look like in person. There are 12 of them in all; they're in the park between Faneuil Hall and the Aquarium.