Are you a Bitcoin miner or trader, but find yourself lacking the compulsive need to check exchange rates like the drug-fuelled daytraders of Wall Street? Fear not – you too can adorn your home or office with a Bitcoin Price Ticker! The post is in Italian but you can read a translated version here.
It’s a straightforward enough build – an Arduino compatible board with an onboard ESP8266 is hooked up with an HD44780-compatible LCD. It’s then a simple matter of scraping the Bitcoin price from the web and displaying it on the LCD. It’s a combination of all the maker staples, tied together with some off-the-shelf libraries – it’s quick, and it works.
[Ed: Oh boo! The images of the LCD were photoshopped. Please ignore the next paragraph.]
What makes the build extra nice is the use of custom characters on the LCD. The HD44780 is a character based display, and this project appears to use a screen with two lines of sixteen characters each. However, a custom character set has been implemented in the display which uses several “characters” on the screen to create a single number. It’s a great way to make the display more legible from a distance, as the numbers are much larger, and the Bitcoin logo has been faithfully recreated as well. It’s small touches like this that can really set a project apart. We’d love to see this expanded to display other financial market information and finished off in a nice case.
If you’re wondering what you can actually do with Bitcoin, check out the exploits of this robotic darknet shopper. Oh, and Microsoft will take them, too.
Can it help me find those old HDDs with about 20-30 btc from back when it was so easy to mine and a trip to one of several online bitcoin faucets would dump something like 5btc for your wallet(to generate interest among non-miners), but that total was worth only a few American cents back then. Can it do that?
Same here … I’ve crash hdd with bitcoin wallet with about 40 btc …
Getting a hard drive resurrected cost about $1000 or so, so it would be worthwhile to get done?
Given the success rate of pulling data off platters that have been scratched by failed heads, probably not.
You could spend $80 on spinrite to try recovering the drive long enough to remove the bit coin wallet. Good luck!
I have that LCD shield and it cannot do those graphics like that. There aren’t even dot positions between the two lines or adjacent characters.
Agree. I am pretty certain that headline photo is faked, it is certainly not the standard HD44780 display which is shown in the article itself.
I’m not going to register to get the code and see if they actually have implemented custom characters for some theoretical display like that shown in the headline photo, but I’m going to guess not.
I’ve never seen an HD44780 display without gaps between the characters blocks, that is not to say one doesn’t exist though.
The standard HD44780 has only 8 custom characters. I don’t see how to create the shown display image with this.
I’ve seen it done here on HaD before, but no idea where to find it.
Basically the creator found some clever bitbanging method of loading more custom characters while drawing the screen.
Indeed, it is a regular 2×16 characters if you look further in the post.
There are however LCDs that are 128×32 in similar format, but I am not sure if really compatible.
Here is mine with some more market tickers:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2GC7SuXTso
using the thingspeak.com http api
You should really read all the blog post and also check the code. The real photo is at the end of the article and shows the plain, old boring HD44780 font. The cover image is a mock-up done with some photo editor. Just look at the Bitcoin symbol: there is no way fir a 7×5 display to show such slanted bars without jiggering. BTW: if you try to download the code you get redirected to a number of scam site pretending to “clean” your mobile phone.
Please, do a little check before posting…
Do you people read befor you write (about something you have not fully understood)? Actually, looking at the pictures should have been enough. Here’s how it actually looks:
https://www.reboot.ms/vd/arduino_wemos_d1_bitcoin_ticker_final.jpg
No amount of ‘reading the original article’ would help because it is not mentioned that the image has been modified.
I had to zoom the image and see that the pixelization of the text was different to the bitcoin symbol. At first I though it may have been swapped with a 10×2 chr display.
Sorry, I meant 10×1 display.
Really, that’s half the article about an “enhanced” photo.
The last (bottom) photo in the linked article shows the actual, boring-old-two-line display with “BTC: 1818.50”. No snazzy logo. No double height characters.
Bitcoin, a revolutionary currency… That’s use to convert into fiat.
It wouldn’t be much of a currency if you couldn’t trade it for fiat.
Is there any currency left that is NOT a fiat currency? The last I remember was “pounds Sterling”.
Much like Apple stock, the greatest benefits come to those who started early. Guess where I didn’t start in either one?
Uhm. it is impossible for a 16*2 screen to do that actually. your typical one can only use 8 custom charactersi believe and I don’t spot the normal gaps between the characters so that image HAS to have been photoshopped. I am not getting near a project that relies on that.
Besides just tracking bitcoin is no longer worth it. If you are planning to create a ticker it better track the other big rivals aswell. Ethereum for example has been making some pretty big waves having reached the value that BTC had last year.
LiteCoin, DogeCoin and DigiByte are amongst those that went up.
might as well use a low power wifi or GSM board with a LCD and battery.. Other currencies are only good if you’re one of those people who diversifies 300k in to day trading instead of being smart and doing secured dividends off bonds etc..
Fiat trading is only good with a lot of capital and linear regression..
Only thing I learned from the article was the meaning of, “fiat”… currency backed by the government that issued it.
I made one using a Nokia 5110 display: https://github.com/mcauser/MicroPython-ESP8266-Nokia-5110-Bitcoin
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mcauser/MicroPython-ESP8266-Nokia-5110-Bitcoin/master/docs/demo.jpg
Speaking of BitCoin,
a cow-orker says that the recent ransomware worm bitcoin payments haven’t been touched.
Considering BitCoin is traceable, it would be foolish to touch that account.
BUT, he contends that those who spread the worm probably have a large amount of BC in other accounts
and the need to convert cash to BC for the ransom payment has driven up the value of BC to the point that the their other accounts have grown, making the whole venture profitable to them without needing to touch the honeypot stash.