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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?"
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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.
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Synopsis and quotes, including all LED messages.
FITB? Fucking In The Boardroom?