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.
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."
...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
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
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...
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.
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.
Have you tried turning it off and on ?
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
"If you're going to ride my ass, at least buy me dinner first!"
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
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.
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.
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
packet sniffer
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.
Just have it blink 12:00 repeatedly.