Internet controlled scrolling numitron
posted Feb 12th 2010 3:00pm by Mike Szczysfiled under: peripherals hacks
How’s this for a first microcontroller project: a ticker that pulls messages from the Internet and scrolls them on a set of numitrons. [David Barton] built this using an mbed microcontroller. Tapping an ethernet library he got this to pull data from his server by connecting directly to the cat5 cables. The display consists of three numitrons which are incandescent 7-segment displays. In the video after the break you can see him sending messages to it from his iPod touch. This is just a PHP form that writes the submitted message to a file for the mbed to read. As [David] points out, there’s obvious Twittering applications here, but we just like the way it looks!
That is really clever. I love numitron clocks, but this is one of the few truly creative uses I’ve seen beyond simply showing time. Just don’t tell /b/ the address of the server.