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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?"
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)
Tetris has been played on just about everything, I don't see why you can't port a crappy version to this screen.
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!
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!
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.
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!
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.
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.
Display tweets from twitter as the come in.
Got Code?
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
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
you could write a mod to have it display ammo and health on it and have nothing but the game world on your monitor
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
packet sniffer
toilet paper sensors..warning which stalls are nearly out.
notification of who didn't wash their hands after using the restroom
notification of when the coffee pot is nearly empty.
dupe'd slashdot articles
latest site brought to a screeching halt due to the /. effect
tracking the U.S. deficit in real-time
"Just Smile and Nod." --Huck
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.