Prototype created for a client who wanted an old school way of displaying tweets sent by their followers at their agency's street sign.
Development
The sign is an electromagnetic flip dot display refurbished from an old Sydney bus.
By reverse engineering the serial protocol used to display the fonts I was able to hack it and replace its control unit by an Arduino board connected to Internet that could grab tweets sent to an specific hashtag and display them with different sorts of scrolling and animation effects.
Besides animating the text, hacking the protocol also allowed me to be able to create simple graphics using the sign as a dot matrix display.
