Enthusiast Peter Dalmaris has created a fantastic project that is not only easy to reproduce but incredibly useful. His system connects one of our Dot Matrix Displays to the Internet via an Ethernet-enabled Arduino board and allows for a message to be sent from a web page to the display, and also alert those around the display with a buzzer.
The remote control is made possible by "... Home Alert is controlled via a web page that is hosted on Heroku, a cloud-based application host. The web page is coded in Ruby, using the Sinatra web app framework, and the Redis key-value store".
This offers a neat one-way messaging system that could be good to alert people in the vicinity of the display, or the framework for a more involved system. Either way, you can find all the instructions and required code in the project page. And for more, we're on facebook, Google+, and twitter - so follow us for news and product updates as well.
As used in the project mentioned above, check out our Freetronics Dot Matrix Displays. They're simple to use, yet very bright for indoor and outdoor situations. Available in various colours, the 32 x 16 LED matrix can display text and graphics quite easily - and can be daisy-chained together for extended displays. For more information, see our range of Dot Matrix Displays here.
