LED Signs and Vera

Developer's Corner General Dev Discussions
1

I picked up a $90 LED sign from these guys:
http://www.brightledsigns.com/products/4_x16_LED_Mini_Desk_Sign-12972-0.html

There’s a Perl library here for interacting with the sign:

I hooked up the USB sign to my XBMCbuntu box via USB and am displaying various pieces of info from Vera. It’s an XTreamer Ultra2 running XBMCBuntu 12.2.

Right now I’m streaming the outside temperature that is captured by my Netatmo.

Forgive the code, first time using Perl and not sure how to mark the area below as code

use Device::MiniLED;
use LWP::Simple;
my $sign=Device::MiniLED->new(devicetype => “sign”);

#Grab the outside temp from the Netatmo
my $url = ‘http://192.168.1.106:3480/data_request?id=variableget&DeviceNum=253&serviceId=urn:upnp-org:serviceId:TemperatureSensor1&Variable=CurrentTemperature’;

my $content = get $url;

#Simple message
$sign->addMsg(
data => "Outside temp: " . $content ,
effect => “scroll”,
speed => 3
);

$sign->send(device => “/dev/ttyUSB0”);

I’d like to get this polished up and figure out how to insert the temperature symbol and basically run this every 10 minutes. Also will grab the forecasted highs and lows for the day - would be cool to have a symbol for the weather ( sun, clouds, rain, snow, etc) - it looks like you can do some drawing

Kind of cool for $90 though though having the USB connector on the bottom of the sign would have been nice or in the back for a clean install on the wall. Not sure if you can easily close open ports so that I can have the LED sign run on-demand (e.g. power on and power off)

2

Gave up on the XBMC box to control the LED Sign as I couldn’t gain control of the USB ports (e.g. powering them off or on programatically) so I wound up using a raspberry pi, which is working great. Have a cron job that fires every 5 minutes. I’m going to use one of the old z-wave wall wart power outlets to turn the pi on and off.

3

Nice!

4

i’m thinking i’ll see if i can create a scene where i first power down the rpi via remote ssh wait a pre-defined amount of time and then cut the power to the rpi. you can draw on the device as well so might look into creating different images for the outside weather conditions - you know, instead of actually going outside into the world ;D