3x26 Outdoor Giant LED Sign...... Will it or Wont It .....

[monie]

Hello Folks.

I have been lurking aound the forum and the net in general trying to find a replacement software to control my Outdoor Unisign.

The post is a little long winded sorry.

Being new to this I Hope I wont offend anybody so forgive me if I ask a silly question.

My Display:
Its 26 characters across , 3 lines Down. It Measures about 1.5 meters by .5 meters. (Huge)

We use a piece of windows software called Unisign Multiline Controller to program the Sign.

It is not a scrolling sign (or atleast I have never managed to make it scroll)

Its connected by Serial Port (RS434 USB Adapter I think). The software allows me to program several 'Pages' of information, optionally specifying the date and time each page is displayed. There are options for transition effects for page information appearing and dissappearing. It can display the date, time and current temperature. It can have double width characters, and specify the length of time the page is displayed (default 5 secs).

Once I have programmed a few pages I can save them to file on the computer (more on this in a bit). Or I can send the new set of 'pages' to the sign, which begin displaying as soon as the transfer completes.

So basically I am not sure if there is already support for this sort of display in LCD Smartie. (As I cant open the sign to see what the controller chip is)

I did notice that there is a test module for perhaps my situation, but I wasnt sure how that works.

The good news is that the software I currently use, saves the pages I make in a plain text format, which I think those with a more technical knowledge than me may be able to decode into something usefull, so I am attaching a sample here. (Ive added the begin +++ end ---)

+++
131
26
3
0
2359
101
3112
5
127
A

H e l l o , M y N a m e i s M a r k
I a m 3 2
S o a r e Y O u
0
2359
101
3112
5
127
A

1 2 3
4 5 6
789
0
2359
101
3112
5
127
A


T h e E n d

1AAB1260
---

The first 'page' is as written on all 3 lines centred.
The second 'page' is as written except the middle line 456 is double width
The third 'page' is just the middle line.

I realise this sample configure may not give enough information, but I hope its a beginning and someone could help.

I really just want the dislpay to have RSS feeds on ! PLEASE !

Yours

Mark McLean.

[mattcro]

This sort of display isn't supported in Smartie, but if you know the data format that the sign accepts, you may be able to use the Test Driver to display dynamic messages (like RSS) on the sign. I assume it's a standard COM type serial port that it uses? You said RS434... do you maybe mean RS422 or RS485 or RS232?

I have a scrolling LED messaging display that takes RS232 (from a standard PC COM port, but not a standard connector) and it has a bizarre proprietary message format, which I partly worked out with data sniffing and reverse engineering, not having any software to drive it... you might have to do the same sort of thing if there is no info on the protocol, which is not necessarily the same data as those files contain.

It's difficult to guess the data formatting from the sample you posted, and the files might not be the actual data that gets sent to the sign. You may be able to work out some of the protocol by feeding the serial port data into a terminal program on another port. Try some very simple messages, like a single character on the 1st line, and work up from there. Either way, it's probably going to be a bit of work...