VHS Equipment Review - Programmable Green LED Sign

Labelled as belonging to @RobertButterworth. Some background on this sign here.


(The three dark bars appear to be due to faulty LEDs or circuit boards, not a running demo or program.)

I’m not seeing much reason to keep it as it runs on a 25 year old 386 and uses 3.5’’ floppy disks to store programs. Redundant since we have the Raspberry Pi based multi-colour LED wall.

  • Keep
  • Toss
0 voters

Rob is still around. I will ping him and send a link to this post.

1 Like

I think @dbynoe was working on this at one point.

1 Like

Wow, just looked it up and that was two years ago… I got stalled emulating the isa bus. Then I got working on a job… like took over etc etc.

Surprised to see the dead zones, not too sure whats going on there, might be an issue with the shift registers of the power board. I never made any modifications to the hardware, just plugged in my own ribbon cable in place of the on board 386’s

Im tempted to keep it because its a heck of a lot of leds, that can display usable text but I don’t know if I have the cycles to actually finish it off. Option b is to go the same way noisebridge did it and talk direct to the shift registers: https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Big_LED_Screen

3 Likes

I donated this way back. At the time all pixels were working :frowning: I thought at some point we had it running at VMMF with some text displayed.

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