The USB Message Board from Dream Cheeky.
I was looking for a cool christmas present for my brother, and came across this:
The USB Message Board from Dream Cheeky.
Ok, so it has a silly name, but it is a cute little scrolling led display none the less. Unfortunately, it is for Windows only. When I found out that the Hardware Developer Manual was available though, I thought it would be fun to try and write a Linux driver for it. Version 1.0 took a long saturday afternoon to write- about twelve hours.
I set up dcled so that it works like cat. If you run dcled with a list of files, it will cat each of those files to the message board. If you dont name any files at all, dcled reads from stdin, so that you can use it as a pipe. There is also the --message="" option in case you want to send a single line to it.
After using the program for a little while to monitor The Last Outpost game server, I found that I was always missing the first few words of the message-- by the time I noticed something scrolling and looked up to see what it said, the beginning of the text was off screen. I added 'preamble' mode to fix this problem. If you use preamble mode (and there are three diffrent ones now), then just before scrolling the message, a fancy eye-catching graphic is displayed. For some preamble modes, a graphic is displayed at the end of the message too.
When dumping a file with preamble mode enabled, the start graphic gets displayed anytime that the screen hasn't had an update in at least ten seconds. This is useful when you monitor a logfile with tail -f and pipe into dcled. It puts the eye-catcher graphic in front of every new burst of log entries. I usually run with the echo option turned on too, so that the log messages go to the screen as well as to the message board.
Example: tail -f /var/log/messages | dcled -p 2 -e
The full set of options looks something like this:
Usage- ./dcled [opts] [files]
--brightness -b How bright, 0-2
--clock -c Show the time
--clock24h -C Show the 24h time
--debug -d Mostly useless
--echo -e Send copy to stdout
--help -h Show this message
--message -m A single line message to scroll
--nodev -n Don't use the device
--preamble -p Send a graphic before the text.
--repeat -r Keep scrolling forever
--speed -s General delay in ms
--test -t Output a test pattern
Available preamble graphics:
1 - dots - A string of random dots
2 - static - Warms up like an old TV
3 - squiggle - A squiggly line
4 - clock24 - Shows the 24 hour time
5 - clock - Shows the time
6 - spiral - Draws a spiral
7 - fire - A nice warm hearth
You can download version 1.8 of dcled and use it to send text to the message board under Linux, Mac OS X 10.5.6, and perhaps other operating systems for which you can compile libhid and libusb. Dcled is a userland program, and shouldn't require any kernel recompiling at all, but you will require the libhid-dev pacakge to be installed.
Let me know if you find it useful!
I've been helping run The Last Outpost since '91. If you need a break from fooling around with usb toys and want to play a fun, free, online multiplayer game, click the banner link below to go to the games home page.
