Auction find; LED Sign

I pickFull RGB displayed up three of these interesting full RGB display signs from a local government auction; and while I haven’t done a lot of picking apart just yet, it looks like it’s completely tied to proprietary software. The company that built it the internals appears to be an Australian company that’s no longer in business. It’s beautifully bright, all the LEDs seem to work, and it’s powered by a very impressive 40 amp 5 volt power supply.  
sign2

All sorts of IO.  Ethernet (no I haven’t hooked it up to the home network just yet), RS232 (there’s a 485 in/out not shown in this photo as well). Some custom peripheral port, and weirdly there’s an audio input that goes to the logic board, but it doesn’t contain any audio display; I’m guessing there’s some software based way of having it do sound triggered/modified displays.

There’s a main CPU board, that drives a secondary board, and then three identical LED driver boards. Anyway, this will be my next project, and if I don’t get anything else out of it other than a 1000 bright RGB LEDs and a 200W 5V power supply, I’m still ahead.

 

LED Driver
One of three LED driver boards
CPU
Main CPU
all
The whole contraption

Update to the Serial Gauge

It’s been 8 months since I started selling on Tindie, and in that time I’ve managed to sell more serial gauges than I expected. I have received a little feedback from some of the purchasers, and based on that I’ve updated the software that drives the gauge to enhance a couple of things. The library now contains optimizations to use direct port mode, and main software has an option to set an initialization point. If you’ve got an old gauge, you can download the updated code from GitHub.

I’ve been thinking is there anything I want to add to this project?  Should I start a new project? What should I build? I know no one reads this blog, but if you’ve got ideas, please pass them along.