Welcome to bitcube

A River Becoming is an installation by Colin, Justine, Will, Dave and Gavin, with Andi and Lilian, for Gray Area, San Francisco (October 2026). This site is the team’s working notes for bitcube, the show machine.

Execution plan (status table and session prompts) · Plan & open questions · Log · Hardware · System map (every device, IP and connection; system.json for agents)

Status as of Sun 18 Oct 2026, 18:25. Gray Area install starts Wed 22 Oct.

bitcube is the Windows mini PC that drives A River Becoming: 20 LED ropes over Art-Net, the HUB75 panels over HDMI, and the Reolink cameras. It runs TouchDesigner and a Claude Code session.

Where we are

• Working:
  • Local rain checkpoint (river-local-oct-18.toe, no Modal): one rain/river field in the camera’s view, sampled onto every pixel of the 18 working ropes and onto HUB75 quad 1. Every rope pixel’s position comes from a camera structured-light pixel map (tools/pixelmap/). About 70–200 W in total.
  • HUB75: TouchDesigner’s window covers the whole LED display in black, with only the panel image at its top-left, so nothing else can show on the panels.
  • Camera calibration: 18 of 20 ropes located, colour order confirmed. Ropes 9 and 17 never light (swap test deferred).
  • bitcube boots straight into the rain checkpoint (about 1 minute; restart-tested 16:54) and is on Tailscale. The gallery cam is reachable (also through bitcube on Will’s tailnet); the river cam went to the river on the evening of 18 Oct.
  • System map: a clickable diagram of every machine, device and connection (Agape now, Gray Area planned), with IPs, ports, usernames and the Modal↔bitcube API. No secrets.
• Next:
  1. Feed Dave’s Modal visuals into the ropes and panels through the same pixel map.
  2. Connect quad 2, and fix ropes 9 and 17.
  3. Push the cameras into Dave’s agent.
  4. Re-map once the ropes are hung at Gray Area.

How we’ll get there, session by session: execution plan. Full checklist and open questions (some are waiting on Dave, Andi and Will): plan.

Latest camera snapshot

Every 15 minutes, 08:00–02:00 Pacific. People in the room may appear.

Using bitcube

• Look at it: VNC to bitcube.tail03bc1a.ts.net (needs access to Will’s Tailscale network). VNC shows the real screens; avoid RDP, which blanks the panels.
• Files: \\bitcube\River (Finder: Network → bitcube → River).
• Claude: a Claude terminal opens at login in C:\Users\user\River. Otherwise open PowerShell, cd C:\Users\user\River, and run claude. It reads CLAUDE.md and the docs first.
• Don’t shut bitcube down; restart instead. Don’t run Will’s RopeLights while TouchDesigner drives the ropes.

Archive

• Execution plan: status table, sessions and copy-paste prompts.
• Running log: everything done so far, session by session.
• Hardware reference: ropes, PSAC10 boxes, controller, panels, cameras.
• Design notes: from the team meetings.
• Code: github.com/gavaiken/river-bitcube · Dave’s agent: github.com/drocamor/river-agent (private).