So, I want(ed) a Squeezebox, and logitech decided to discontinue them. So the other thought that had been rattling around my brain for a while was the ‘I could use a Raspberry Pi and a VFD display‘. The trick is to find a VFD that’s easily drivable from a Pi, and a mediacentre installation that’s happy to drive a VFD. I think the poor old Pi is going to have to be controlled via the network (although, actually, I think it could probably replace the Viewsonic box – meaning we’d just need the one box doing eeeeverything).
My hesitation is that I’ve not done anything like this for a long time. I actually find myself somewhat nervous about it.
Which is odd, when you stand back an look at my history. I built (granted with help) a digital to analogue display to drive a speedometer and rev counter (and a bunch of dash lights) from a game. I then patched a game by hacking to read the contents BBC’s memory whilst it was running, finding where it was storing the speed and rpm. Then wrote an assembly language patch which overwrote the joystick controller section of the game (there was no spare memory to allocate to my hack, sadly) with a lookup table which contained output values that correlated to appropriate values to drive the AtoD at to make the speedo and rev counter (the speedo of which had been hacked to contain the guts of a rev counter) display something approximating the graphics onscreen. Then I added a driver to output those numbers to the user port on a BBC micro (thus driving the nice little D to A). All without overwriting bits of a game that was notoriously difficult to fit into the Beeb’s 32K. I designed and wirewrapped that board. I did that. No one else had done that specific thing before.
Now granted, whilst the Raspberry Pi sports the monkier ‘Model B’, harking back to the awesome BBC Micro, my ex-knowledge of 6502 assembly language is unlikely to be helpful here. But really, attaching a VFD to a Raspberry Pi is something that has been done before, and doesn’t particularly require specialist knowledge. I mean, it requires a bit of basic editing of files and understanding how to use ‘make‘ and so on. But even rusty as I am, a quick look at a Man page and I should be away with that without too much trauma.
And having written this, I feel fairly committed to making the idea come about*. And so, I shall maketh my shoppinglist(eth).
– Raspberry Pi
– VFD display (HD44780 compatible, probably 20×2)
– Powersupply (if John doesn’t mind handing me another from his selection of supplies)
– Pi case (heh)
I’ll also need to knock up some kind of VFD case, although I have an idea about how I’d like to go about doing that.
Anyhow, today is devoted to adjusting the brakes on my bike (because I’m on nights, and being able to stop on my way home (or indeed, on my way to work) is convenient.
* Although my clock project has so far failed, because the clock keeps stalling for no obvious reason, and for some reason the WAP54G caused all hell on our network and failed to extend the network to the garage, which was its entire point, but I wanted to replace that with the OpenWRT firmware anyhow, so need to retry sorting that out.
