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projets:fuz:duhamel_flipdot

Duhamel flipdot

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

Project information

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

Goals

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

Resources

Log

Fabien and Lomanic (Fabien mostly :-D) 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
projets/fuz/duhamel_flipdot.txt · Last modified: 2023-02-02 22:06 by 127.0.0.1