[Petru] seems to have designed his weather ticker project with beginners in mind. Leveraging the inexorable forces of both the Raspberry Pi and cheap online auction house modules, it’s nearly the Hackaday equivalent of painting by numbers. But not everyone is a Picasso, and encouraging beginners to get their feet wet by painting happy little trees is a good cause.
Behind the simplicity is actually a clever architecture. An installation script makes installing the right Raspbian distro simple, and installs a few scripts that automatically update the user code from a GitHub repository. To change the code running on the machine, you can upload a new version to GitHub and press the reset button. (We would also want a way to push up code changes locally, for speed reasons.) Something like this is a great idea for a permanent Pi-based IoT device.
But as a first project, the hope is that something like this will encourage folks who find code too abstract, but who are nonetheless drawn by the allure of blinking lights, to play around with code. And unsurprisingly, this has already been entered in our Enlightened Raspberry Pi Contest which focuses on the simple-yet-impressive stuff you can do with a tiny computer and some electronics.
You know I won’t want these hanging around the house when I’m 70 or so, will think I’ve been kidnapped into an old peoples home overnight.
Found a grammatical error:
“An installation script makes installing the right Raspbian distro simple, and [it] installs a few scripts…”
It might be correct in its current form, but it just sounded weird reading out to me.
Anyone have experience using ProLite LED tickers? I have an old one, it has a few ports on the back to drive it, bit I can’t find any examples of people driving them from a Raspberry Pi
can’t help you with the rpi, but if its the same one as mine, they were serial or tcpi/ip look for a (windows7 or earlier) app called Multimedia LED 2007