For my first project I'd like to build a unit which retrieves XML information from a website, parses the XML to identify which tubelines do not have good service and then turn on or blink a lightbox for each tubeline (up to 13) depending on the each line's current service.
I'm just planning/getting started (i.e. about to order & wait for the ethernet shield), but will use the ethernet shield twitter example http://arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/TwitterClient as the base for calling and parsing the XML data, then will set up a number of if cases to determine which lines should blink (all others will just turn on).
I've been looking for which parts to buy for the project, and I haven't found anything that could be used as the lightbox backlight (about 20mm high by 80mm long), does anyone have any suggestions as to an LED strip/board which might be appropriate? The LEDs won't need to be addressable, the entire backlight would only dim or blink as a whole. I'd also like to power the whole unit on the PoE via the Ethernet shield to minimise cables, do I have a hope of running 13 backlights simultaneously through the Arduino Ethernet shield PoE, or will I need some funky power set up?
Unlike the twitter example above, I'll need to be placing multiple strings into an array out of the XMl to parse it, so once it identifies one string to add to the array, it will have to continue reading the XML until it finds the next string, I'm hoping this won't be too hard to overcome with some if statements, any thoughts are welcome!
Other than that I guess any comments about the feasibility/difficulty of the above would be welcomed, as well as any thoughts on problems I might come up against in the process (I'll be interested to see if the Arduino calling the XML data will hit a cross-domain request issue).
Thanks!