[Swansea Hackspace] Flip-Dot Display Group Project: Update

[Justin Mitchell]

On Tue, 2018-07-10 at 04:53 +0100, Peter Barnes wrote:
> All,
> 
> It's been quite a few months since the Hackspace embarked on a
> project to bring some old bus displays back to life. I'm please to
> report that we have made great progress, and plan on having a fully
> functional display made up of six panels ready for EMF2018
> 
> Last night, with the help of Tom, we managed to get pixel level
> control over a panel, using a very high tech method of connecting tac
> switches to address lines! Next job is to use a MCU to pulse those
> lines with somewhat more precise timing, so we can get full control
> over the panels.

Great stuff.

Have you documented which pins do what, the voltages and currents
required, etc ?

I looked at the project page you listed but it only points to other
peoples similar projects.

> Once we've sorted that out, we need to work on a few things:
> 
> We need to design and build an enclosure / stand that will allow us
> to show off the displays to the public at EMF. This will likely be
> built out of bits of wood in order to raise the display to eye level
> and tilt them up a little to make them easier to see. The enclosure
> will include a large, plexiglass panel to protect the displays from
> the elements.

> We need to come up with an effective solution for controlling all six
> panels in real time. Our current idea for this is to pair each panel
> with an MCU that will update its pixels, and then network them
> together using a SBC (perhaps a Raspberry Pi 3B+) acting a bit like a
> hypervisor.

Once we know how many control lines there are, how many pixels etc then
people can suggest suitable control mechanisms. Also questions like, do
you want the panels to be usable independently and interchangeably? is
it better for the control interface to be wired, or wireless ? How
quickly can pixels be updated, and thus what is the max frame rate
likely to be ?

> Once we can control each pixel in the entire display, we need to
> write software to make it do something cool. Ideas for this have
> ranged from games such as pacman, a twitter bot, scrolling text and
> more. Perhaps we could even make a system that would allow EMF
> attendees to program the panel with to do something else entirely!
Might be worth taking a look at the Blinkenlights projects from, well
over a decade ago now, they would install light sources in the windows
of office blocks, wire them all up to a central control, and play
animations and games on them.

afair the software was all open source, and features stuff like
multiple controllers, transfering patterns and synchronisation. 
istr there also being a plugin for some video playing sioftware that
would output the blinkenlights protocol.