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

[Gwion Davies]

Is there scope for a camera to be added and used render a live B&W feed to the frame as some sort of crude view finder?

Sent from my iPhone

> On 10 Jul 2018, at 09:13, Justin Mitchell <justin at swansea.hackspace.org.uk> wrote:
> 
>> 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.
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Hackspace mailing list
> Hackspace at swansea.hackspace.org.uk
> http://swansea.hackspace.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/hackspace