LED signs

[David Evans]

Hi, all.

Has anyone here mucked with LED signs, the sort that display messages that typically scroll? I'd like to build something that includes one (basically it's an IRC-controllable office status displayer to help calm lost students) and local expertise would be a fun way to filter out the myriad of rubbish on the web.

Ideal for my purposes would be:

- USB, pretending to be a serial port (can be relaxed--USB-RS232 adapters are not a big deal)
- Documented protocol--I do not intend to run some crazy Windows thing
- Indoors
- About 20 characters

Am likely to drive it using a Bifferboard. A Raspberry Pi would add cachet, but I have only one f those and about 5 Bifferboards…

Unsure I'll be there on Tuesday but if so can talk about it with someone.

[Matt Lloyd]

We have two scrolling led signs over at NottingHack both show the same stuff but the firmware is different, they show messages from IRC, twitter, google groups.

There some info about both on the NottingHack wiki and code is distributed between github and google code, links should be on the wiki somewhere.

Everything inter talks using mqtt over the network and we have an irc<>mqtt bot that sits in the #nottinghack irc channel.

Most led signs are just shift registers so very easy to actually output to.

London also have similar led<>IRC sign and again it's all on there wiki


I would explain more but down at EMFcamp right now. If you can get over to NottingHack one Wednesday night I can go thought it a lot quicker in person.

'RepRap' Matt
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[David Evans]

On 2 Sep 2012, at 13:47, Matt Lloyd wrote:

> We have two scrolling led signs over at NottingHack both show the same stuff but the firmware is different, they show messages from IRC, twitter, google groups.
>

Cool. What I want to build is far from profound, so I'm glad that others have done it first.

> Everything inter talks using mqtt over the network and we have an irc<>mqtt bot that sits in the #nottinghack irc channel.
>

Ahhhh mqtt. Andy Stanford-Clark would be happy.

I shall dig around on the wiki and see what I turn up!

> I would explain more but down at EMFcamp right now.

Is this fun? I was tempted to go but one can do only so many neat things...

[Spencer Owen]

Hi David,

I have played about with the Shure LED boards connected to an Arduino.  It's the 8 x 23 board as seen here.  This is one on eBay, but there's lots of other sizes, colours and prices, and they can be daisy-chained to virtually whatever size you want.

There is a pretty good Arduino library that makes programming them quite simple.  It can do scrolling text and all kinds of other clever stuff.  The Arduino shows up as a serial port via the USB lead, and I'd imagine it would be pretty easy to get it to get it to display stuff as it receives it, or have pre-set messages triggered by short commands.

If you want, I can dig out the code I used, although to be honest, it's basically just the demo code that comes with the library just tweaked a little bit.

Hope that helps

Spencer