LightPost: Connecting Soso Coast to Coast

Long distance relationships are tough. At Sosolimited, we work hard to keep our bicoastal studios tight.  To augment our daily Google Hangouts and annual karaoke sessions, we created LightPost, a transcontinental LED portal.  

With LightPost, we can control LED walls located in each studio. Draw a picture, use your webcam, or write some Javascript to send a message to Boston or San Diego.  The web interface grabs your pixels and sends them to a server. We built the system to be highly modular and expandable, so that any drawing client can send frames to the server using a simple JSON based interface. 

At each studio, a Raspberry Pi listens for new data.  Once a new batch of pixels comes in, the Pi lights up the LEDs.  The result is an instantaneous display of your message!  The system can loop any number of incoming frames, so it's perfect for showing off animations (or your low-res face) at parties.

Soso had a blast creating LightPost during a week-long code camp.  The whole studio came together to design the idea and the software.  Everyone took part, from designing an amazing website to programming each part of our full-stack system.  

We're just starting to scratch the surface and are looking forward to putting the LightPost platform to work in some new creative projects.