from Hacker News

The most unhinged video wall, made out of Chromebooks

by varun_ch on 3/1/25, 5:54 PM with 59 comments

  • by szvsw on 3/1/25, 6:29 PM

    Congrats on delivering this fun project! I do a lot of work with synchronizing media content across devices so it’s always fun to see the solutions people come up with. You probably came across them in your research, but the industry standard way of creating a synced video wall like this is with BrightSign media players. The total cost for purchasing them and the screens would for 20 displays could easily end up in the 10s of thousands, so big kudos to you guys for finding a way to make this work with recycled devices.

    If you are ever interested in working on some mediasync-related codebases hit me up! We hire devs to do freelance contracts fairly often.

  • by greggman25 on 3/1/25, 7:16 PM

    I worked at Google when Chromebook shipped. They put out a call for decorations for the lobby and I proposed something similar to this but they said "no" :( Maybe because I asked for 40-64 machines :P

    I would not have tried to sync video though. Instead I'd have made time based animations and use the network the synchronize the clocks.

    you can see an example here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64TcBiqmVko

    It's 8 machines running Chrome. The only thing synchronized are the settings and the time.

    They machines do not have to be in a grid either. I was inspired by the Boston Science Museum's virtual aquarium

  • by ashirviskas on 3/1/25, 11:57 PM

    Cool! I did a similar thing with 4x4 tablets, after connecting all 16 of them to ADB and a single host I was able to automate most of the stuff. The I just created 16 virtual screens on sway with 16 VNC clients and streamed it all over Wi-Fi as a test, but Wi-Fi worked so well that I did not look for more efficient solutions.

    For that period my PC had 19 displays, 17 of them over VNC and it was glorious. I could either do something on all of them, or dedicate each for a different purpose/program (music, htop, calendar, clock, ssh sessions)

    Though dealing with all the hardware was quite annoying - some throttled, some had connectivity issues, others batteries would not hold charge and so on.

  • by bazzargh on 3/1/25, 7:50 PM

    A similar thing from many years back: the junkyard jumbotron let you assemble a random collection of displays to display their portions of a much larger image

    https://github.com/mitmedialab/Junkyard-Jumbotron

    Video https://youtu.be/cAUtSVSTbzU?feature=shared

  • by amendegree on 3/2/25, 11:59 AM

    If you’re just skimming and didn’t read the whole blog: this was done by high school students over the course of their high school career, makes the project even more impressive imo.

  • by mos_6502 on 3/2/25, 12:18 AM

    >Now, I’m not entirely sure why this works so well, but I came up with a ridiculous solution by accident […]

    >This means that the slowest computers hold back the fastest computers […]

    It works so well because you’ve optimized the system’s design with respect to its bottleneck. Check out the theory of constraints :)

  • by layer8 on 3/1/25, 8:21 PM

    Literally unhinged, the Chromebooks.

  • by netcraft on 3/2/25, 2:23 PM

    Super cool!

    We needed to do something similar one time with 5 large touchscreen tvs that were arranged as a table, where each side needed to be a separate touchscreen application with them all playing a synchronized video in the background but users could interact with things flowing from one end to the other and could send objects from their other apps in any direction to other apps, like users sending things they found to the person on the other side of the table.

    We ended up with a trashcan mac pro (thats about all we could find in budget that could drive all the screens at the same time) with apps that were synchronized using redis (I wrote that part). It worked really well, though I didnt get to see the finished product before I left that company. But we always really wanted to have separate computers that were synchronized. We just couldnt get that to be reliable enough - it worked for a while but then various things would throw it out of sync, meaning we would have to restart the applications periodically which wouldnt work.

    Something I have always wished we had, since the very early days of PCs was the ability to network devices together in such a way that they could share their resources and collaborate more. Imagine being able to take advantage of all of the computers in an office to do a task like a supercomputer. Of course thats a very hard problem, applications and OSs would need to be designed for it and we would need new algorithms (look how long it took us just to take advantage of multiple processors in the same machine on the same board), but there were some projects out there like seti@home and folding@home that did it somewhat, but I always hoped it would be something that the computers themselves would support.

  • by mrbluecoat on 3/2/25, 2:24 PM

    > I embarked on the journey of building ‘my own distro’ that we could install on the laptops. The system should start with something minimal (no desktop environment), and have an elegant script to autostart a kiosk mode Chromium instance. I first tried NixOS before quickly realising there was no way it would work with the tiny amount of storage on these Chromebooks (and it failed to install with every single attempt). Then I gave up, started with a Debian minimal install and ... I realised I would be wasting so much time (installing Debian is very ‘hands-on’ - you need to press lots of buttons), and I discovered ‘FAI - Fully Automatic Installation’ and the web FAI.me tool

    DietPi, OpenWrt, and OpenBalena have autoinstall options as well that allow you to select specific packages and install on minimal bare metal. I'd be curious if there are other non-desktop options out there..

  • by leohonexus on 3/2/25, 2:56 AM

    Most interesting thing to me is how switching to coreboot fixed the freezing. Do you have a theory of why that might happen? I wonder if it's ACPI/DSDT related or if HW controllers were initialized incorrectly using the original BIOS.

  • by jpeggtulsa on 3/1/25, 11:00 PM

    Me and another developer did this on a 300 seat call center on Windows Embedded thin clients probably 8 years ago now. We used timestamps and a high precision javascript library for synchronization. After everybody went home for the night, it would scroll the name of the business and the stats from the day across all the screens until a couple hours before the first calls, then it would load a queued video or text or even just colored lines similar to the windows screen saver depending on the day.

  • by nashashmi on 3/1/25, 6:52 PM

    I wonder if it would have been easier to make just one video and have the computer zoom in to different parts of the video. And then run the video simultaneously through a web browser

  • by lakesta on 3/2/25, 2:40 PM

    Awesome work -- way to have a vision and see it through to the end. That process will make you a success in life and you'll learn a lot, too!

  • by sandreas on 3/2/25, 3:26 AM

    Wanna see a great video wall out of reverse engineered iPod Nano 6 displays and learn something about reverse engineering along the way?

    There is a video series from Mikes Electric Stuff from 11 (!) years ago, which is fantastic.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TedIzmguP0

  • by incanus77 on 3/2/25, 11:39 PM

    Love to see this repurposing. My first experience with Chromebooks was after a workshop at Teardown '23 here in Portland, where I attended a session on using the MrChromebox stuff. I eventually ended up using the knowledge to encase Chromebooks in custom-built cabinets for use as display screens and GPIO interfaces for a science festival educational exhibit on electromagnetism and speakers.

    https://justinmiller.io/projects/catchthewave/

    The machines are rugged (the spec I use is "able to be dropped on concrete from waist high and to have a full soda dumped in the keyboard") and once running Linux, fast and light. And I got them for $50 a piece!

  • by cjaackie on 3/1/25, 9:11 PM

    fun to see the ‘write protection’ screw and think back to my toshiba chromebook, it also got coreboot thanks to Mr. Chromebox. Linux never ran quite right on the eMMC sadly…

  • by niutech on 3/2/25, 2:38 PM

    Lenovo Thinkpad 11e aren't junk. I own one with Ubuntu and it still serves me well. Why people in the 1st world disassemble them or throw away rather than upcycling by upgrading OS and donating to the children of the 3rd world, like OLPC used to do? Still half of population doesn't have access to computers. This is hugely missed opportunity to help poor children!

  • by jojol on 3/1/25, 6:48 PM

    Excellent work, and a great read.

    What videos did you end up playing on this after your testing was complete? Do you have any recordings to share of this in action?

  • by mezzman on 3/1/25, 9:10 PM

    This one from 2013 when the Chromebook Pixel was announced was pretty great too. https://tomsepe.com/portfolio/google-pixeltree/

  • by fitsumbelay on 3/1/25, 8:13 PM

    so awesome

  • by IshKebab on 3/1/25, 6:51 PM

    That's an insane amount of work. Enjoy having free time while it lasts...