How to

June 18, 2007 9:40 PM

From a technical and practical standpoint, how can I set up both of the following in my office building. 1) a news ticker (real, scrolling text) 2) a light that flashes every time an incident is triggered on an attached computer

Both would need to be attached to personal computer (mac, xp, or linux - all are available). As new incidents are triggered (e.g. via an email arriving in a Thunderbird folder or via an RSS feed), something a)adds the entry to the scrolling text and/or triggers a light to flash (preferably larger, like stoplight size).

I swear I've googled all over, esp. for the ticker, but all I find is software for onscreen tickers, not larger ones meant to be viewed farther away.

Thoughts? Links? Any experience yourself? Thanks in advance for always being a great help and a great bunch of people.

posted by gbinal to computers & internet (10 comments total)

Hmm. The Costs of War / National Priorities Project website suggests you put a ticker on main street, and says it costs ~$950, and implies people could help you figure it all out if you telephoned them, but that's as far as they go. If no one here knows and if your project is anti-war in purpose, you could call them...?
posted by salvia at 9:49 PM on June 18, 2007

http://www.instructables.com/id/EW47QZ6F2FRVLLX/?ALLSTEPS will help you scratch the second itch.
posted by dws at 9:52 PM on June 18, 2007 [1 favorite]

linux you say?
the Phosphor xscreensaver does what you want.

Here's something from the ubuntu forums to get you started.

dunno about the siren.

If you want a professional, all-in-one package, you want a symon board.
posted by boo_radley at 9:53 PM on June 18, 2007

You want an LED Ticker. Many of them have RS232 (serial port) links. Here is a tool to control a particular model.
posted by phrontist at 10:08 PM on June 18, 2007

X10 is what you want for turning your big light on and off.
posted by phrontist at 10:09 PM on June 18, 2007

How big a ticker? A couple of jobs ago, I picked up a Beta-Brite LED sign for around $150 and wrote a perl script to send various bits of information to it, triggered by a web form. The protocol is well documented, and it ought to be fairly straightforward to write a script of your own.
posted by hades at 10:09 PM on June 18, 2007

Seconding Symon board. I used one back when I worked for ...uh, a really big technical company with branded high-end datacenter servers that isn't IBM. *cough*

Our Symon board had our team's stats rolling all day, and support stats, and down times, and whatever else the management wanted on there.

It was Windows based, and had both server and client applets: The server told the board what to say, and the client could be installed on any PC and was a small mirror of the board.

The board itself was three color LED, but not full color, three or four lines, each 8" high or so, and something like four feet wide. It took its orders via Ethernet.
posted by SlyBevel at 11:10 PM on June 18, 2007

...Server App, of course...

There wasn't a whole dedicated server running just to feed text to the board, it was just a server app on any Windows box on the floor.
posted by SlyBevel at 11:13 PM on June 18, 2007

It would have been an older version of this. These are prettier than the one I stared at all day.

It was closer to these.
posted by SlyBevel at 11:20 PM on June 18, 2007

Thanks folks.

I'm starting at the top and working my way down. Please let me know if anything else comes to mind.

Gray B.
posted by gbinal at 7:21 PM on June 19, 2007