Slashdot Mirror
Interesting Uses For a USB LED Screen?
Hogwash McFly writes "My boss gave me one of those USB-powered red LED scrolling displays as a Christmas gift, and while cycling the usual 'I read your emails' and 'ID10T Error' messages will be entertaining for a day or two, I was wondering if it could be put to more constructive uses. The configuration file is plaintext and supports different scroll speeds, flashing, bitmaps, and WAV sounds. The font is defined as 5x5 pixels per character, also stored in plaintext as 5 hex values, one for each vertical line of pixels. A dynamically generated message could prove useful in my day-to-day work on the helpdesk, but are there any interesting uses beyond network notifications and news feeds?"
Matrix screensaver.
or look at anything done with the pertelian
http://www.pertelian.com/joomla/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=43&Itemid=48
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Unless you plan to put it in your car to give the finger to people honking at you in queue, the only use for LCD screens i can think of is notification. Considering the recent interest in Gnome and KDE for a centralized notification system, you could probably hook _that_ up for your LCD screen so you'd get _all_ notifications.
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart" (Linus van Pelt)
A never ending game of pong
Put it in your window at home and use it to hollah for girls that pass by.
porn video => avi to ascii converter => red hot LED action
Combine it with a motion sensor near your door, and have it warn you to duck under your desk.
Bad experience is a school that only fools keep going to.
8=====D
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Never underestimate a technology's capacity to be used for porn.
Tetris has been played on just about everything, I don't see why you can't port a crappy version to this screen.
When it "sees" a fatal or critical error, pipe it into the file and let it display on the led screen. should be pretty easy to do with a tiny shell program.
Hack the firmware and make it play pong. Or a very simple version of doom.
Hello World
Tetris can't be crappy.
diegoT
Getting it to display audio level meters for your music would be kinda fun.
For maximum freakout potential you'll need two things:
1) A microphone
2) Speech recognition software
Set the microphone up in a hidden place where it will pick up speech from folks hanging around your desk, and connect it to your computer. Set up the speech recognition software so it will spit out text to the LED display's interface.
Viola! Instant "Have we entered the twilight zone?" machine!
I like cocoa.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
...to supplement your (apparently Windows) desktop machine?
But seriously, folks:
- Rain gauge
- Hope meter
- Cray-style front panel indicators? Mem registers, etc. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5RwZz9UPUs - jump to about 0:50 and watch the rest)
- Strings from network traffic? Count and display the number of occurances of the Top 5 most commonly reused strings snarfed from office-wide network traffic?
publicly display line by line the EULA for Linux SUSE 11.1.
Karaoke,typing out phone conversations as you are speaking so you don't have to listen. build website to take advantage of serial conversation interfaces,have a small device that fits on a keychain with 5 or so buttons. A small,web connected green computer.
Pong
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
It's almost 5 hours since the last story and this is the best /. could come up with?
Oh well, it is x-mas eve I guess.
Happy hollandaise everyone!
...have it display all new comments to this thread.
neither can pong.
I reserve the right to have a physical object so I can sell it later, and recover my money.
I've been thinking it would be cool to get a sign like that and post it in a visible place at home, then use it to post announcements about my kids' accomplishments. I'd set it up so my wife could change it as well. We'd post things like "John did the dishes every day this week", "Mary aced her math test", etc.
The intent would be to show them we care and to give them positive reinforcement.
The other helpdesk people are going to be focused on their tasks, not glancing around the room for the possibility of some LED screen update. If there's an actual issue they need to know about, you should already have something in place for that.
What managers love to see are things like average call time, # calls in the queue, and # dropped calls. If you can extract that out of your call tree application and put that up there, you're one step closer to pointy hair yourself.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Game of Life?
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
PC LOAD LETTER
You obviously never tried the "Daikatana" edition of Tetris. You can't finish a level without your buddy Superfly. I got 45 "L" pieces in a row and John Romero made me his bitch.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Scroll the current National Debt, that is of course assuming that anyone can meaningfully read 11 trillion on a scrolling display.....
Just pick a random day far in the future, And have it countdown to that day with the words, Only (insert time) until it happens! Then refuse to tell anyone what it means. It should provide interesting conversations at the water cooler.
Restore the madness of youth's lechery
Buy a belt buckle version and take that sexy geek desk accessory look with you wherever you go! http://igadgets.com/22-jb002.html
Use it as a ticker to scroll the real-time DoHS advisory status:
That shows stocks rising and falling at the will of its owner! Make people sell their Google stock so you can buy it slightly cheaper.
This sig isn't original enough, it's time to come up with something witty...
Clearly anyone with such a clock would need to keep track of that.
Have it read out the BOFH stories. Those should bring back fond memories of the first few thousand times you read them AND it will give the new kids in the office something to laugh about.
Don't just say you read his emails. Actually put them up there! Continuous scroll of everything in your boss's inbox.
If you're slightly less daring, feed your log of all URLs (site name only, perhaps) as they're being viewed by anyone in the office. Your boss did make you keep a log, didn't he?
What do you mean they cut the power? How can they cut the power, man? They're animals!
Stick it on ebay and with the money you receive go and enjoy the fast food meal of your choice!
AT&ROFLMAO
Use it to display caller ID for incoming phone calls.
Say create a program that manages your logs and you get a statistically significant increase of errors report the server giving the errors. You may want to fudge the statistics a bit to give more priority to Errors and less for warnings.
Or warn when you servers drive is near filled or something that would require manual action is near.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Better yet, coca of the month subscription?
A message board in your car wouldn't necessarily have to give the finger or otherwise be witty/rude.
There are times when a rear-pointing message board could be extremely useful. Such as:
Your high-beams are on.
Your headlights are off.
Careful, the driver next to me is drunk.
And so on.
However, such signs very well may be illegal in some jurisdictions.
Hey Einstein, riding my ass won't make me go any faster!
Tailgaters SUCK!
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
OK! Useful. Here's what you do...
The day before you leave on your next vacation, set it up so that it loops the message "I love you!" and then set up the .wav file of Barney the dinosaur singing his "I love you, you love me" theme song. Remove the socket covers from your cube wall and attach the electrical leads that power the device directly to the power lines, covering them with two-inch thick conduit. Then epoxy encapsulate that power connection really well (if the connection happens to be through a wall wart, be sure to conduit and encapsulate those connections as well). Disable any power switch the device might have and leave. When you get back from your vacation, your co-workers will have all either quit or committed suicide and your path to the next level up the corporate chain will be cleared. Repeat as necessary until you are CEO. Take golden parachute and leave. You win!
That is all.
How big are those Wav files it supports? To TTS generated speech and play them back. That's way better info density than the led screen.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Have you tried turning it off and on ?
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
No, that's delivered by a UPS guy that keeps talking into his sleeve and hangs around waiting for you to open your package...
Display tweets from twitter as the come in.
Got Code?
Mount the thing in the back window of your car, and set it up so that it's preloaded with around a dozen messages that can be displayed as the need arises while you drive.
My suggestions would be things like:
"Turn your highbeams off retard"
"Kindly move out of the fast lane"
"Next time try signalling"
"I'm boning your wife"
If libertarians are so opposed to effective government, why don't they all move to Somalia?
Can the poster add the details of this particular gadget...manufacturer name/part # ?
Take a cue from this post and write a script that uses vmstat and top to alter the scrolling speed and scroll something useful that shows the health of your box. You can cut one of the numbers pumped out by vmstat to set the scroll speed, and maybe grep, head, etc. something useful out of top to show on the screen. I'd write a little suggested script for you right here, but I have no idea what format your device wants its config file.
Building Better Software
Very "Colossus: The Forbin Project"...
----- The internet has given everyone the ability to have their voice heard equally as loud.. even if they shouldn't be
Here are some ideas for dynamically generated messages for use at work. (Assuming that you use a ticketing system at work.) Most of them use database backends that you can connect to using your favorite protocol. Find a useful way to display pertinent information on the display.
For example, do you have an overdue or high-priority ticket? Program it scroll a reminder. Do you queue tickets and handle them serially? Set it up to display the number of tickets in your queue and the header for the next ticket. Smaller helpdesk where you're responsible for managing systems? Display network metrics from your monitoring system. Managing helpdesk employees? Have it display metrics about your technicians.
Other fun stuff...if you have a swanky gaming rig at home - you could use it to monitor temperatures (ambient/case/CPU/GPU/Disk, etc). You could also pull CPU, disk, and network stats and display it as a histogram or bar.
-Turkey
Ok, so you can have all the fun things... but something useful?
Doesn't that depend upon what your company does? Are there stats that you could track? With sound effects when sales are made for example?
You could hook it into the badge system (if your company has one) so it shows who is arriving and leaving....
You could hook it into the company stock price if it's a public company.
You could have it play the news. Boring, unless it's the onion news. Could get you fired though but at least you'd be able to take your display with you.
Tell us more about your work environment please.
If it's a workshop you could track accidents; how many fingers lost today...
Tell us more!
you could write a mod to have it display ammo and health on it and have nothing but the game world on your monitor
Hook that sucker up to Hudson (https://hudson.dev.java.net/) and use it to display build/job status.
Put it in the back window of your car and attach it to a mobile device with a touch screen. You can tell people to get off your ass, or tell off the drivers going 40 in a 55 (on a road with a 65 defacto speed) after you pass them.
First of all, look at the kinds of things that people do with lcdproc. One of those might inspire you. It sounds like you're talking about slightly different hardware, but I'd expect it to have similar applications.
Second: if you are a bad sysadmin (like me) and don't check your logs or statuses very often, and once found that you had run on a degraded software-RAID for several months, then write something that occasionally looks at /proc/mdstat and then says on your display "RAID OK" or "RAID degraded." That's one of the things I use my VFD for.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Power it from your in-car supply and you can use it to signal to other drivers.
Personally I'd use it to send a mirrored message to the car in front:
"Please turn your damn fog-light off. I can see you perfectly clearly when I'm right behind you."
The months are just too short. I can count the number of days on one hand.
Kind of like those safety signs at industrial sites that brag about the number of days without an accident.
Program the display so that the number of seconds continuously counts up, and then resets to zero after a random interval -- say thirty or forty seconds.
You can use it to print out the incoming spam. After-all, they want you to read it...
On shutdown, have it output the lyrics of "Daisy Bell"
This isn't necessarily relevant to your job, but one of my favorite utilities for LCD displays is to report CPU usage by core and allocated/remaining RAM. It's not something that can be easily accessed while doing full-screen stuff and it's ridiculously useful (or maybe just informative).
There was an episode of the X-Files where people started seeing messages in digital displays--microwave ovens, watches, radios, etc. I forget the story of that episode, but the messages always urged violence, and something about them made people snap and go berserk.
If I had one of those displays, I'd have it displaying something mundane and useful like news, but periodically it would flash KILL HIM and YES YOU and KILL THEM ALL and KILL THEM BEFORE THEY KILL YOU.
But then, I am a sicko.
Connect it to the web and allow anonymous people to send you messages which will be displayed on your device. Here's a website already doing this, maybe it'll give you some ideas:
http://www.notallmine.net/cam.asp
http://www.notallmine.net/howdone1.htm
Measles, acne, chickenpox, hives, meningitis, herpes, etc.
1.Sell it on eBay.
2. Wait
3. Profit
ASCII PR0N!
I dare you...
-Billco, Fnarg.com
packet sniffer
Put it in the back window of your car and use it as a virtual bumper sticker.
We once at a college computer lab wanted to make random memorandums, Novell Netware messages over the network like:
Captain Hook "Ahah, Peter Pan, I found you at last!"
Mickey Mouse "I want more cheddar please."
Cookie Monster "Cookies! Omm omm omm! I want more cookies."
and all kinds of fictional characters sending random messages like that to various people as a joke. My supervisor suggested it and I had hooked the DOS interrupt that Netware used to send messages. But our lab manager spoke out against it and the other supervisor who had admin status got upset that we were testing it and set a batch file to tell us to knock it off and repeated the message a hundred times.
But now that I think about it, it could be a fortune cookie LED with random fortune cookies.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
the athiest quoter!
the number of days since the help desk helped anyone?
I've always wanted to use a similar device to put in the back window of my car to display messages such as "Please remove your car from my trunk" and other similar messages.
Set the flash rate to trigger seizures in photosensitive epileptics in the work place. Watch them get shaken not stirred!
"Horn broken......watch for finger!!"
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I was considering getting my wife one of these to hang over the kitchen entry to remind her of her to-do list items during the day. Of course, I might ssh in and display I LOVE YOU randomly as well. Ultimately I decided it was not a good Christmas present, as if a hint to do more chores. But, maybe randomly next month!
I would rip it open and use the LED matrices directly with a microcontroller. Vertical scrolling 5x7 text would look so much better, and non-text graphics would be cool too.
The hidden microphone picks up your boss saying "You're going to be there for the meeting" and spookily displays on the screen "Your snow fling tuba hair forte meeting!"
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
FEED ME A CAT
http://lists.puremagic.com/pipermail/robotgroup/2008-March/008641.html
curl http://www.gutenberg.org/files/4300/4300-8.txt >/dev/your/new/toy
Put a little keyboard infront of it, make it relay what you type to the screen, make it a command prompt.
BOFH style rolling excuse generator. Need an excuse, just look up and read off the display.
Make it display the text of the most recent 7chan, 4chan, and 99chan's /b/ posts updated realtime. It won't get you fired, i promise!
WÌÌfÍ--ÍSÌÒÍ...Í...ÌHÌÍfÍÍÍ--ÍÍÍ
Get off my virtual lawn, you damned virtual kids!
if they are going slower than you, I don't think you are cutting them off exactly.
Just because someone does not drive with the same pet theories as you does not mean they are stupid or assholes.
Just have it blink 12:00 repeatedly.
Download the top 80 or so classic masterpieces from Project Gutenberg. Things like Treasure Island, Heidi, Sherlock Holmes, and so on. Books you have not read, and are culturally important.
Set up the display with fine control over the scrolling speed, so that you can increase or decrease the speed in small increments (say, plus or minus 1% of current speed).
At night, before bedtime, "read" a novel by scroll sign, while slowly incrementing the speed until you are reading at your mental pace (about 450 WPM) instead of your normal reading pace (about 150 WPM for most people).
Do this consistently for an hour each night. You will need more than one day to finish any novel.
After a year, you will have read the top 80 culturally significant written works. Your intelligence (specifically: reading comprehension) will have greatly increased. When you hear a political review that, for example, obliquely references something in Sherlock Holmes, it will make sense. You can speak in terms relating to situations described in these works ("He's taking a Pollyanna view"), and you will have a larger vocabulary.
Enjoy your new found status and higher pay rate.
I'm curious which one you got and how easy it is to control via the USB port. Someone else here already mentioned LCDproc (which is included in Debian, at least, and is easy to get for other distros and OSes). I'm guessing there isn't already a driver for it, but one of the aims of LCDproc is to make it easy to write drivers for.
Once you have something like LCDproc talking to your device, it's easy to write client programs in Perl or Python or any language that can open a socket and keep it open and have the client programs do what you want. I have written Perl clients to monitor work processes, keep me updated on current weather conditions, what's playing on xmms, the time of day in multiple timezones, etc.
What model from what manufacturer? The last time I looked, most LED displays had prehistoric or proprietary interfaces, and a display that connects via USB and is easily programmable sounds like a lot of fun.
There are all sorts of key business metrics to put on such a display, making them more visible to everyone in your company. This is good because it makes people aware of something that they should be thinking about.
For example:
- Number of registered users (for a social site or MMORPG, which cares about community size)
- Number of ad impressions (if that's your revenue model)
- Number of sales (or dollar amount, etc.) for eCommerce sites
- Time since last server outage (to get people to focus on uptime)
- Number of downloads (for an app)
Or whatever is appropriate for your business/technology.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
game of life simulation!
Hmm? What? What year is this?
--- Tao
At work we actually have a LED-matrix showing more or less useful information about our project. (My boss's boss said we could get a flat screen tv, but my boss wanted something tacky)
Now it runs standard test suites against svn head and displays the result, together with the difference from last test.
It also says things like : 'Branch maintenence failed, last commiter was userXXX.'
"he, who has quotes in his signature, is a douche" - unknown.
You could do something like this.
---
"I can't complain, but sometimes still do..." Joe Walsh
I've been looking for a USB-connected LED display on Thinkgeek, but no luck. I saw the PioLCD, but everything else seems $300+. What other LED/LCD displays are available for under $200 USD and work with Linux?
Now serving # -32768
Wait -- what's the question again?
they sure as hell better take the opportunity when they can safely move over.
or else what, Mr. Angry Driver?
Hi Slashdot please tell me how to play with my new toy. Stay tuned for next week's Ask Slashdot where I ask you which of your suggestions is the best.
Bring in some road flares, wire them up with some electrical tape and bell wire. Program the display to countdown random arabic characters while chanting. Do this at random times throughout the day or when someone you like is in your cube/office bothering you.
Get this and this do a tiny bit of soldering, and tada, you have yourself a 320x240 262K colour OLED display you can use to display whatever you want, from simple characters to full image bitmaps. It's commanded using serial commands that are transferred across the USB and the USB connector has Linux drivers. (Not to mention the display is touch sensitive AND OLED)
I don't need to test my programs.. I have an error correcting modem.
Sell advertising space.
I've got my display (a very retro looking 1x20 14-segment VFD!) hooked up to our monitoring system. Every alert that goes to the pager goes to my desk as well. If one of our NOC operators fails to respond to an alert, they'd have an awful hard time telling me that they didn't get the page.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
And turn your office building into a giant Virtual Boy display. If LCD Glasses are available, you could even emulate the 3D effect by setting each bar to the right flicker rates.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
N/T
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
rule34....
somebody's a /b/tard.
How many bits are in a hexadecimal digit?
If you think the answer is five, like the author does, you are incorrect.
I'm not sure how fast the driver board can update the LED's but you might be able to make a cool POV display out of it...
Unexpect the expected!
Pager?
Not having used this device, I don't know how feasible this is, but a grid of LEDs is screaming to play Conway's Game of Life.
Where I come from (across the pond from you guys), the rule is "keep two driving-seconds distance", which automatically scales distance with speed.
Plus, you don't have to use rough eye measurements but can, at any time, check the period between the other and yourself passing a sign, lamp post, pot hole, or whatever.
"Good news, everyone!"
I have two 2-line 20-character VFD displays, like you'd see on top of a pole on the back of a cash register (in fact it used to be part of a cash register.) I was using one of them as a dual timezone clock for a while. http://www.jms1.net/code/#vfdclock has the code, and a picture of the units, if anybody is interested.
See Title!