Duhamel flipdot

Lomanic bought a Duhamel bus flipdot display off Leboncoin. Let's make something of it!

• Owner: Lomanic
• Participants: Fabien, you?
• Status: alpha
• Project created on Sat 25-01-20 by lomanic

• reverse engineer and document the flipdot
• make use of the flipdot at Fuz, with an ESP module of course

• https://damow.net/fun-with-flip-dot-displays/
• https://wiki.muc.ccc.de/flipdot%3Astart (German)
• https://github.com/sintech/Flip-Dot-Display
• https://flipdot.wordpress.com/
• https://www.falatic.com/index.php/225/new-project-interfacing-to-and-or-driving-a-flipdot-display with a link to the previous blog and an eBay seller page (same guy). No information though
• https://hackaday.io/project/159415-flip-dot-display-diy-controller/log/149181-a-bit-about-pricing-and-sourcing (obsolete though)
• how it works https://flipdots.com/en/electromagnetic-flip-disc-technology-how-it-works/
• https://hackaday.io/project/169541-flip-dot-clock-games-departures flip dot clock, Raspberry Pi Zero-based
• https://markwtech.com/clocks/flip-dot-clock/ another flip dot clock
• https://youtube.com/watch?v=DZdEKYEQ3sA How to connect and test Hanover Flip Dot Display. Part I: Using Deric+ Controller (a comment says to use 24V)
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITLLirkhehs How to connect and test Hanover Flip Dot Display. Part II: Testing without controller (18 to 24V according to author)
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcN_nGvcxeU Reverse engineering a flip dot sign (quite basic stuff in fact, it's a barebones flipdot without any logic, mentions 18V)
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HoeJRwjy5dY Adventures with Flippy the Flip-dot Display - Software and Teardown (Hanover, RS485, baud rate is 4800, linked blogpost https://engineer.john-whittington.co.uk/2017/11/adventures-flippy-flip-dot-display/)
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6kWa3wLCok Teardown d'un afficheur flip-dot et analyse du firmware (furrtek, Hanover, 24V, RS485 again), https://twitter.com/ivoidwarrantie/status/1393691784581197825 same display
• http://rainer.radow.org/flip-dot.php and https://radow.org/flip-dot-8x7.php (95% german), last one even with some code. The project looks quite advanced (other German displays brands though) with hardware and software (Arduino-based), but it's not obvious if the software part is being shared. Check the YouTube channel also (dampfboot) (maybe another interesting link). Try to contact him at rainer @ radow . org maybe
• http://swansea.hackspace.org.uk/Projects/Flipdot Hanover, deep reverse engineering effort (schematics), some videos/pics of it in action on their Instagram
• https://medium.com/coinmonks/flip-dot-display-with-arduino-and-rs485-shield-ca2cec1b971a Alfa Zeta, 24V RS485 again, (thanks to my curly haired friend)
• 60 fps (again thanks to my curly haired friend)
• Rollsign Gallery, Showing the history of public transportation through their destination signs with the most comprehensive collection on the web! really old school website

Fabien and Lomanic (Fabien mostly ) barely scratched the surface of the flipdot during one Saturday afternoon of tracing its PCB and components, what we found:

• the fluorescent light works, unfortunately I don't remember the DC voltage as it was months ago…
• there's an antique Lattice in here (Lattice ispLSI 2032 80LJ H907B01). Dumping its memory would be really hard (as in, find a computer running DOS/NT with the right hardware to talk to it and try to dump that, then… try to make something of the binary returned!!) and useless, this is a black box and should be swapped for an ESP
• we were able to manually flip some dots by applying current on some traces on the back of a module. We were also able to flip a line but without a lot of logic, using an Arduino. Next step is to put an ESP in place of the Lattice and try to flip some dots from the ESP, should be way easier.
• we weren't able to find a serial-based or CAN-based protocol from the weird plug, where we would have been emulating the original “computer” to send commands to the display