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Hi everyone! So here's another project that I've been working on. I call it the "Ego Ticker."
And what it's doing is it's sharing my different social media scores across this scrolling
LED sign. This is a scrolling LED sign I found on eBay, pretty cheap and it takes just serial
data. And so these are my different scores-- like they're my Klout score, my number of
YouTube subscribers, how many foursquare points I have and so on and so forth. And so I have
an Arduino with an Ethernet Shield and it's checking a PHP server--a web server. The web
server knows how to check all the different kinds of API's to get those scores and will
just pass along the data to the Arduino, which in turn, passes it along to this scrolling
sign.
The scrolling sign, as I mentioned, is a--takes serial data in and actually it's pretty easy
to figure out. There's just a phone jack on the back that you can pass the data through.
And what it--the way it works really is that there's a text file that you set inside that
has all the static data. In other words, the different names of all the social networks.
And you put in place holders for where you want the dynamic data to be. And then it's
easy to send one little thing of dynamic data to update one of the scores.
The reason you do it this way is because if you update the whole text at once, it actually
blacks out the whole display and then starts the scrolling over again. So if you want the
scrolling to keep going and going and going, you just update little pieces of dynamic data
in memory. And it actually works really well. It was really easy to figure out. I found
a PDF online that had the whole protocol for how to work with these signs online and it
was no problem just sending serial commands with an Arduino.
So, it's where I am right now with this. I wanted to add Facebook friends and maybe hits
on my website, but figuring out the PHP to do that has been a little bit slow. And I
also wanted to maybe have other kind of alerts come up on this as well. Maybe @ mentions
on Twitter or something? I don't know. Anyway, I wanted to share with you my progress on
this. I hope you like it. And maybe I'll make a full how-to out of it if people are interested
in seeing how you can work with signs like these. That's it. Bye!