Re: USB scrolling LED signs

[Jamie Bennett <jamie.bennett@xxxxxxxxx>]

Comments in-line below.

On Tue, 2009-10-27 at 22:22 +0000, Kim Wall wrote:
> On 27/10/09 21:53, Jamie Bennett wrote:
> > I'm looking for a LED display that I can routinely send messages
to
> via
> > usb through the command line (I only have Linux based machines
here)
> and
> > is of a reasonable wall-mounted size (around 1 meter?).
>
> > Anyone seen something like this at a reasonable price?
>
> I have a couple of these: <http://www.ebuyer.com/product/135289>
>
> They speak serial at 2400 baud (so are very tolerant of line length),
> rather than USB, but I'm sure a dongle will work. The supplied
> software
> is Windows and awful, but the protocol is fairly straightforward if
> you've got a Windows machine and Realterm available to
> reverse-engineer
> the bits you need - it's basically ASCII text with sequences of bytes
> as
> a preamble and to set colour, font etc.

USB-> serial is fine I can live with that but a simple cron job to send
messages to it via a perl/python/shell script would be perfect.

> They're a little on the cheap and naff side, most notably there's a
> occasionally visible redraw if you display static text, and it emits
> an
> annoying 'bip!' sound every time it receives new data (I ended up
> de-soldering the sounder, as I wanted a default "HH:MM"
clock display,
> redrawn by the computer every minute in the absence of a more
> interesting message), but they are a fraction of the price of 'proper'
> LED signs.

Price is perfect. The de soldering I can cope with too if its not too
involved. I kind of want the display to always be there but not draw my
attention to it so a audible announcement of a new message wouldn't be
good.

> I'm driving them from some horribly hackish Java code that does
> assorted
> automation tasks, to provide deaf-friendly visual indication of caller
> ID, doorbell and the like.

Oh, sounds very interesting. Is your java code available? (and does it
rely on any of the windows libraries?).

> Kim.

Regards,
Jamie.




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