Difference between revisions of "Alpha 220 LED Sign"

Revision as of 17:25, 11 November 2012

2009-1 3rd Place Contest Winner!

You can find one of these signs for less than $100.

220 Full Matrix, (Case 37.7" x 3.8" x 2.9 ") Tricolor[1]

Install a Serial Port Interface

In this case a KuroBoxPro was used however any Linkstation could be used by accessing the serial port interface.

First, install a serial port interface. There are two physical serial ports on the KuroBoxPro. One serial port on the bottom^[2] which is the same as the port on the Linkstation Pro and one on the daughterboard accessible from the front. Both are addressed as /dev/ttyS0. Consider soldering in a pinheader rather than the pressure connector used in the LSPRO method.

Interface Sign to Serial Port Interface

A standard 6 wire telephone cable meant for a two line phone is used (a 4 wire one will not work) Plug one end into the sign, and one end into the Quick port RJ-12 Jack. Wire the jack into the serial port board as such^[3]

RS-279-422

Pin 4 of the RJ12 to RS-232 RXD Pin 3 of the RJ12 to RS-232 TXD Pin 6 of the RJ12 to RS-232 GND

Setup the serial port

Adjust the serial port settings, below is a script to do this. This information comes from a FAQ on using the Alpha sign with Linux^[4].

Basically this

1. Links /dev/ttyS0 to /dev/alpha
2. Gives everyone read/write access to your sign (/dev/alpha)
3. Provides a 9600,E,7,1 connection to the sign (/dev/alpha)

setledsign

# /usr/local/bin/setledsign
#!/bin/sh

rm /dev/alpha
ln -s /dev/ttyS0 /dev/alpha
chmod a+rw /dev/alpha
stty 9600 -opost -ocrnl -onlcr cs7 parenb -parodd < /dev/alpha

Wake up the sign and display something on it

alphamon.pl

# alphamon.pl
#
#!/usr/bin/perl
#
# Script will display the contents of /tmp/textfile to the ALPHA 220C LED
# Display
#
# Usage
#
# alphamon.pl [MODE TAG] [COLORTAG]


# Get the attention of the sign
print "\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0";


# Tell the sign to print the message
$message = `cat /tmp/textfile` ;

print "\001" . "Z" . "00" . "\002" . "AA" . "\x1B" . " $ARGV[0]" . "\x1C" . "$ARGV[1]" . $message . "\004";

Alpha Sign Syntax

MODE TAG and COLORTAG

The key parts of this are the MODE TAG and COLORTAG, there is full documentation available for this^[5]but here are the pertinent parts.

Ticker (Stock, Weather, News)

The sign can be used for a number of purposes (to display weather forecasts from an RSS feed, to display news feeds as a news ticker) As a proof of concept the following script uses the sign to display a stock ticker that gets it's data from Yahoo! it then colors the prices

GREEN if they are positive/up

and

RED if they are negative/down

for the day

First install perl and make

apt-get install perl make

Then install the quote package ^[6]

wget http://www.circlemud.org/pub/jelson/quote/quote-0.05.tar.gz
tar -xvzf quote-0.05.tar.gz
cd quote-0.05
./configure
./make
./make install

install curl and lynx so that they can be used later to get content from the web.

apt-get install curl lynx

Lastly here is a shell script to display the ticker

leddisplay

#! /bin/bash
#-------------
#  leddisplay-
#------------- 
#
#  A Script to display stock quotes, weather information, and news "
#  on the ALPHA220C Sign"
#  
#  usage leddisplay [flag] "
#    s = stock quotes"
#    w = weather "
#    n = news "   
#
#
#====================
# User Set Variables=
#====================
#
# Weather Url
#
WURI=http://weather.yahoo.com/united-states/illinois/chicago-12784260/
#
# News Feed URL
#
RSSURI=http://feeds.reuters.com/reuters/topNews/
#
# Stock ticker symbols
#
stocks="  ^DJI ^IXIC ^GSPC AAPL"
#
#
LINES=10  #Number of headlines
EXEC="/usr/bin/curl -s" #Path to curl
dow=$(date +%u)
hour=$(date +%k)
PTE=/usr/local/bin

# Script Body


if [ $1 == "" ]
   then

   exit
fi

if [ $1 == "w" ]
   then  

lynx -dump  $WURI | sed -n '/   Today/,/Tomorrow/p' | sed -e '$d' > /tmp/textfile

        perl $PTE/alphamon.pl t 2 > /dev/alpha
      exit
fi 


if  [ $1 == "n" ] 
   then
	$EXEC $RSSURI | grep title |\
	sed -e :a -e 's/<[^>]*>//g;/</N' |\
	sed -e 's/[ \t]*//' |\
	sed -e 's/\(.*\)/ \1/' |\
	sed -e 's/\.//' |\
	sed -e 's/\"//' |\
	sed -e 's/\"//' |\
	head -n $(($LINES + 2)) |\
	tail -n $(($LINES)) > /tmp/textfile
        perl $PTE/alphamon.pl t 1  > /dev/alpha

      exit
fi 
   
if [ $1 == "s" ] 
   then
	quote $stocks | cut -d"(" -f1 |sed 's/^/\x1C9 \x7F \x1C3 /' | sed '/ -/s/:/\x1C1/g' | sed '/ +/s/:/\x1C2/g' > /tmp/textfile
        perl $PTE/alphamon.pl t A  > /dev/alpha
   exit
fi

clear
echo  "leddisplay"
echo  "---------- "
echo  " "
echo  " A Script to display stock quotes, weather information, and news "
echo  " on the ALPHA220C Sign"
echo  " "
echo  " usage leddisplay [flag] "
echo  " s = stock quotes"
echo  " w = weather "
echo  " n = news "   
echo  " "

  

leddisplay-timeofday

#! /bin/bash
#
# News Feed URL
#
RSSURI=http://feeds.reuters.com/reuters/topNews/
#
# Stock ticker symbols
#
stocks="  ^DJI ^IXIC ^GSPC AAPL " 
#
# Weather Url
#
WURI=http://weather.yahoo.com/united-states/illinois/chicago-12784260/
#

LINES=10  #Number of headlines
EXEC="/usr/bin/curl -s" #Path to curl
dow=$(date +%u)
hour=$(date +%k)
PTE=/usr/local/bin


if [ $hour -ge 5 ] &&  [ $hour -le 8 ]
   then

lynx -dump  $WURI | sed -n '/   Today/,/Tomorrow/p' | sed -e '$d' > /tmp/textfile

        perl $PTE/alphamon.pl t 2 > /dev/alpha
      exit
fi 

if  [ $hour -ge 16 -o  $hour -le 5 ] 
   then
	$EXEC $RSSURI | grep title |\
	sed -e :a -e 's/<[^>]*>//g;/</N' |\
	sed -e 's/[ \t]*//' |\
	sed -e 's/\(.*\)/ \1/' |\
	sed -e 's/\.//' |\
	sed -e 's/\"//' |\
	sed -e 's/\"//' |\
	head -n $(($LINES + 2)) |\
	tail -n $(($LINES)) > /tmp/textfile
        perl $PTE/alphamon.pl t 1  > /dev/alpha

      exit
fi 
   
if [ $dow -ge 1 ] &&  [ $dow -le 5 ] 
   then
       quote $stocks | cut -d"(" -f1 |sed 's/^/\x1C9 \x7F \x1C3 /' | sed '/ -/s/:/\x1C1/g' | sed '/ +/s/:/\x1C2/g' > /tmp/textfile
        perl $PTE/alphamon.pl t A  > /dev/alpha
   else 

	$EXEC $RSSURI | grep title |\
	sed -e :a -e 's/<[^>]*>//g;/</N' |\
	sed -e 's/[ \t]*//' |\
	sed -e 's/\(.*\)/ \1/' |\
	sed -e 's/\.//' |\
	sed -e 's/\"//' |\
	sed -e 's/\"//' |\
	head -n $(($LINES + 2)) |\
	tail -n $(($LINES)) > /tmp/textfile
        perl $PTE/alphamon.pl t 1 > /dev/alpha

      exit


fi

Make it Wireless

A USB Wifi Stick

In this case a Nintendo WiFi USB connector, which used to be widely available at every store that sold a Wii (before the CSIRO lawsuit).

Udev should pick this up automatically when inserted and load the proper kernel module. You can do a quick dmesg to make sure that it was recognized.

# dmesg | tail -n4

usb 1-1: new high speed USB device using orion-ehci and address 2
usb 1-1: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
phy0: Selected rate control algorithm 'pid'
usbcore: registered new interface driver rt2500usb

Software

Get wpasupplicant and wireless tools (throw in bridge-utils for later)

apt-get install wpasupplicant wireless-tools bridge-utils

I use WPA on my network, so I used wpa_passphrase to generate the basic contents of /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf

wpa_passphrase ESSID passphrase

Here is what mine looks like:

/etc/wpa_supplicant.conf

# WPA-PSK/TKIP
network={
        ssid="ESSID"
        key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
        proto=WPA
        pairwise=TKIP
        group=TKIP
        psk=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
}

Edit the interfaces file (I used a static configuration, you could always use DHCP instead):

/etc/network/interfaces

#
# we always want the loopback interface
#
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback
#
# default dynamic setup (no adjustment necessary)
#
#  auto eth0
#  iface eth0 inet dhcp
      hostname `hostname`
#
# sample wireless setup
#
auto wlan0
iface wlan0 inet static
wireless-essid ESSID
address 192.168.1.145
gateway 192.168.1.1
dns-nameservers 192.186.1.1, 69.50.168.189
netmask 255.255.255.0
wpa-conf /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf

Test it out

Restart networking or reboot the box, you should be able to login on the address you gave the box (192.168.1.145 in this example) with the ethernet unplugged!

References

1. ↑ 220 brochure (Pdf)
2. ↑ Add a Serial port to the ARM9 Linkstation
3. ↑ Building a Data Cable for Alpha LED Scrolling Signs
4. ↑ Using the Alpha 215C with Linux
5. ↑ Alpha Sign Communications Protocol (pn 9708-8061)
6. ↑ quote -- command-line stock quote display