Hi all,
I thought I would share what I've been working on. I've been lurking for a while, but due to a silly little Windows text file carriage return problem, I joined the forum today.
I've been working on this during my summer as a pet project with no real direction. I went to the London Arduino meetup group back in March and one of the guys there was showing the LED strip he bought and was controlling individual LEDs in a 5m strip. That got me thinking and I've ended up with this...
The crux of the project rests on the wonderful FastSPI_LED2 library and the guys over on the Google Community for the library have been a great help.
I narrated the video to explain a fraction of what is going on, but the overview is that this uses the Arduino Mega 2560, the official Wifi Shield, the SD library and a 300RGB LED WS2811 strip.
Currently as it stands today, the SSID and password for the Wifi network is read off the SD card, this then connects to my network and draws some data from my web server, namely time and weather data which utilises the World Weather Online api to localise for my postcode. The message that scrolls through is now read from the SD card. The time, date and current temperature pop up intermittently. The "video" is a series of 30x10 BMP images which have been created in Premiere (The eyes) or Flash (Pac-Man) and are read from the SD card.
The Matrix, ripples and snake patterns are generated from code and are generally random.
I think that's it so far. I'm going to make a form on a web page that can be accessed from any mobile device, stored in a database, then fed through when the Arduino hooks up to my site. This will allow me to send messages to the display. Facebook notification numbers are something that could be cool and maybe twitter feeds. I'll be making some icons for the weather and displaying current, future temp, weather, wind speed and direction shortly.
A few more patterns and as many "videos" as I can fit on the card. Then... some sort of interactivity maybe?
Anyway, I've learnt loads from this process and if anyone has any suggestions for how it could be used, then please do comment away.