LED Bulletin Board

Created bulletin board using ardunio, raspberry pi, and some programming know-how to create a mini programmable billboard.

The creation of this item started out with a Raspberry PI. With a Raspberry PI, it has an arm processor that you can use a debian based linux called Raspbian. The easiest way to get the OS on there is by using berry boot. Berry Boot is a boot loader that automatically downloads the image of various linux distros and puts them on your Raspberry PI.

After the Raspberry PI, I looked for a project to start working on with the mini computer. Someone had made mention to do a LED sign, so I said sure. But that sounded simple, maybe I should throw in a way to send it messages, and for it to get messages. So I started to look into the hardware materials. I got most of the electronics from Element14 and AdaFruit. Each site had great tutorials about how to get started, and I found out that I would need another circuit to help ease everything. The other circuit I got was an arduino. So all together I got these parts:

List of parts
1)Raspberry PI
2)Arduino
3)(4) 16x24 LED Panel
4)some chain cables to connect the boards together
5)Crap load of Legos

If you go to Lady Ada’s site, there is a tutorial of how to connect the LED’s together and even a how to on how to get it connected to the Arduino. After some retooling, I was able to program the Ardunio to control the LED board through a serial port. This is where the Arduino shines, as it was very easy to get communication going for the serial bus. Now that I got the serial portion done, it was easy to create a .Net program, using mono, to display values on the LED sign.

So for now, it works fine, but I plan to use Node instead, to expose a restful web service to send messages and to update the board with information. Here are some pictures:

UPDATE!

Here is the server source code for the led sign: server

Here is the client source code for the led sign: client

Arduino source code coming soon.