LED Sign Control and other geeky goodies

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 17:09:00 +0000

As previously mentioned , I've been tinkering with a USB to Serial adapter.

The exact cause is an LED sign I purchased (Cheap!) from Sharaf Electronics. The sign itself is branded Bluefield, but as I would later discover, it's actually manufactured by Amplus Industrial .

The software that came bundled is (of course) Win32 only. Not a problem, using a serial port sniffer I was able to dissect the protocol easily. Except for one itsy little thing. There was a checksum included in each command. Fortunately Derek and PapaJ quickly pointed out that it was simply an XOR of the data, sans the initialization tag.

From there I hacked together a little perl script to control it, and TaDa, toledo is born. UPDATE: I've decided that this version is entirely too crappy to be of any use for anyone, I am currently working on a more stable version, rewritten from the ground up. Stay Tuned.

The script itself is far from complete, but I ran into some serious portability issues. While, Device::SerialPort and Win32::SerialPort are largely compatible...ish, getting those up and running on OS X and Win32 are a freaking nightmare.

Making Device::SerialPort on OS X requires a lot of 'extra' installation (XCode, darwinports, etc), and I won't even get into what I had to go through on Windows. (It started with nmake, and ended with me installing VisualStudio Lite...no kidding).

As such, I've scrapped both of those for the time being, choosing to instead dump data to a file handle. Which means that every so often you end up with a blocked serial port, and occasionally a BSOD. But it works.

Early on, I contacted Bluefield asking for documentation. About two days ago I received a 17 page PDF detailing the entire protocol (and shedding some light on some other, more interesting, things). While it was a bit late for this project, it may still find use, and it was quite refreshing that rather than fight or argue or blah blah blah, they took the time to follow up with the OEM, secure the documentation, and then forward it to me.

I've also noticed that the theme this site uses (which does it's own PHP/libGD magic) has only been pulling from a small pool of my flickr photos.

As such, I've updated the flickrey theme to support the Flickr per_page argument , it should now pull from my 500 most recent images.

And finally, while cruising through some nabaztag forums, I noticed that someone posted my Applescript, wholesale copy/paste, no credit/link whatsoever.

I realize of course that I don't have a license, and I certainly don't charge for these little hacks, but c'mon people. Even a "..found this over here.." in the post would be nice.

As such, I've decided to start using a creative commons license with my code. It's no more or less restrictive than my previous "Here, take it, just say thanks" license, but at least now it's a little more 'official'.

And we all love 'official'

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LED Sign Control and other geeky goodies