making an lcd TV into a message board?

[mikem]

Has anyone seen a good way to generate high quality graphics to display on an LCD television (or any tv for that matter)? Was thinking of using a TV as a sign board to advertise specials and give the time and temperature etc.

The commercial made programable signs are really expensive and I was thinking that this would be a lot cheaper way to go. Will the composite video signal be obsolete soon? Will I need an HDTV type video generator?

Thanks--Mike.

[SETEC_Astronomy]

I think the cheapest and easiest way to do what you want is to use a computer to display content on the LCD TV. If your only interest is text and maybe a few pictures a computer from Craigslist for $50 would suffice. The TV would need to be high def only if you'd like to display fine point small text otherwise standard def TV should be acceptable provided you use a large enough font.

[mikem]

I assume that you mean to use Power Point? Is there an easy way to add time and temperature to the picture? That would give people more reason to look at it. Thanks--Mike.

[VernGraner]

Has anyone seen a good way to generate high quality graphics to display on an LCD television

If you want something inexpensive that is "stand-alone" you might want to consider the "Y-BOX":

http://ybox.tv

The unit uses a propeller chip to produce NTSC video output and you can program it do produce graphics or display text. There are some neat applets available that do weather etc. Have a look and see what you think.

Vern

[fripster]

or... use a SD-card eating photoplayer. Make graphics in .jpg format, put them on the SD card, and voila!

FRIPSTER

[mikem]

The Y box site is interesting. But their kits appear to be sold out and the resolution of the TV monitor on the youtube demo is pretty primitive.

SETEC's idea of using a computer gives me a thought. Some of the new tv's have inputs to used as a computer monitors and maybe I can program something in visual basic to do time and temperature and add it to messages.

The dedicated programable signs of any size are thousands of dollars. This might give me a much cheaper way to do a similar thing. Thanks to all!

[SETEC_Astronomy]

...maybe I can program something in visual basic to do time and temperature and add it to messages.

Absolutely, you could create the graphics and text in near limitless ways on a computer. If can give the computer net access you could even add NIST synced time, local weather, maybe local traffic data or news, etc.... I think you'll find you have plenty of options if you use a computer.

A lot of video cards support Composite out, S-Video, HDMI and so on. Just make sure you get a card and TV that have matching ins and outs of course.

[CeaSaR]

Using a computer opens up more possibilities than one could imagine. You wouldn't need
to program anything in Visual Basic or any other kind of programming language. Just use
good old HTML. There are so many tricks and freebies to spice up a web page that you
could go hog wild before you are done. Of course, you know how good (or bad ) web
pages look on a monitor. Just think how they will look on a much larger format.

Best of luck,

CeaSaR

[haklesup]

If you were going to use a PC as the driver, I too would use HTML. Can use a browser in full screen mode and with an internet connection it should be straightforward to capture weather and temp.

If live weather were not a condition but only images and text, you might just want to record the images onto a plain old DVD of which you can find even upscaling DVD players for quite low cost. There used to be a number of Analog video Titler projects for adding text to recorded video (especially home movies on VHS) I seem to remember a couple projects in the now defunct Radio Electronics over 10 years ago. Something like that could be used to stream live text to the bottom of the screen like a news ticker. A small number of these still exist used on eBay search "Video Titler"

Composite Analog video is not going obsolete, just that form of video when broadcast over the air. There will still be plenty of uses for locally fed video like security cameras and CCTV. Expect even all-digital TV sets to still have an analog input for some time.

[reloadron]

Hi all

Mikem's original post gets one to thinking about some interesting ways to make this happen:

Has anyone seen a good way to generate high quality graphics to display on an LCD television (or any tv for that matter)? Was thinking of using a TV as a sign board to advertise specials and give the time and temperature etc.

The commercial made programable signs are really expensive and I was thinking that this would be a lot cheaper way to go. Will the composite video signal be obsolete soon? Will I need an HDTV type video generator?

Thanks--Mike.
Has anyone seen a good way to generate high quality graphics to display on an LCD television (or any tv for that matter)? Was thinking of using a TV as a sign board to advertise specials and give the time and temperature etc.

The commercial made programable signs are really expensive and I was thinking that this would be a lot cheaper way to go. Will the composite video signal be obsolete soon? Will I need an HDTV type video generator?

Thanks--Mike.

Using a PC is likely the best way to go about this as was mentioned and suggested. Dumping the video out from a PC to a TV video input should work just fine assuming the GPU out from the PC supports the TV resolution. However, let's put all that aside for a moment.

Now since the original post mentions "Was thinking of using a TV as a sign board to advertise specials and give the time and temperature etc." my thought was something like advertising in a store or some sort of business location. Then I would assume that this advertising could change daily, weekly, monthly or on some timed basis.

I saw the mention of just using some presentation software like PowerPoint which made good sense to me when I read it. I also saw the mention of creating a HTML page which also makes good sense. Actually a PowerPoint presentation can be saved as a HTML page, actually another slick trick is to convert a power poing presentation to FLASH but don't think that is needed.

Anyway, maybe a PowerPoint presentation could actually be embedded into a HTML pahe. The merit to using PowerPoint or similar presentation software is that a series of slides with text, images and effects could all be timed and embedded into a single HTML page. That would likely work, or maybe work.

Now the original post also mentions "and give the time and temperature" and that part may not be as easy as it looks to actually get done. Doing the time in a HTML page is relatively easy. The actual script I would use is JavaScript, however, getting the temperature or weather is a bit of a challenge. The time can be gotten from the computer's system clock and if we assume a good system that get's regular NIST sync it will be accurate.

The following code is an example of an HTML page that displays the date and time:

Code: Select all

<HTML>
<head>
    <style type="text/css">
        .style1
        {
            font-size: large;
            color: #0000FF;
            font-weight: bold;
        }
    </style>
</head>
<BODY onLoad="showdate()" style="background-color: #CCCCCC"       
>
    <span class="style1">Today is:</span><BR>
<p><span id="clock"></span></p>
    <p>
        This is an example of a clock that reads from the system clock. This is placed 
        in
        <br />
        a HTML page but uses JavaScript to do the work. The formatting for the day, date<br />
        and time are done using the script.
    </p>
    <p>
        &nbsp;</p>
</BODY>
<script type="text/javascript">
var dayarray=new Array("Sunday","Monday","Tuesday","Wednesday","Thursday","Friday","Saturday")
var montharray=new Array("January","February","March","April","May","June","July","August","September","October","November","December")

function getcurrentdate(){
var mydate=new Date()
var year=mydate.getYear()
if (year < 1000)
year+=1900
var day=mydate.getDay()
var month=mydate.getMonth()
var daym=mydate.getDate()
if (daym<10)
daym="0"+daym
var hours=mydate.getHours()
var minutes=mydate.getMinutes()
var seconds=mydate.getSeconds()
var dn="AM"
if (hours>=12)
dn="PM"
if (hours>12){
hours=hours-12
}
if (hours==0)
hours=12
if (minutes<=9)
minutes="0"+minutes
if (seconds<=9)
seconds="0"+seconds

var cdate="<big><font color='800000' face='Arial'><b>"+dayarray[day]+", "+montharray[month]+" "+daym+", "+year+" "+hours+":"+minutes+":"+seconds+" "+dn
+"</b></font></big>"
if (document.all)
document.all.clock.innerHTML=cdate
else
document.write(cdate)
}
if (!document.all)
getthedate()
function showdate(){
if (document.all)
setInterval("getcurrentdate()",1000)
}
</script>
</HTML> 

Now for anyone curious you can open NotePad and copy and paste the code above into NotePad and save the file as something like My Clock Page.HTML. Just be sure to add the .HTML file extension or you will be saving a text file. Save the file to somewhere convient like the desktop. Now double click the saved file and the page will open in your browser and should show the current date anhd time with a small message. I didn't really bother to format it.

The problem becomes temperature or weather. Generally weather on a web page can be done using an RSS Feed. The weather channel offers some nice tools and a great feed. However, this is not a real web page residing on a real server. OK, maybe a desktop widget? Then the problem becomes how to get the data from the widget into the HTML page? Also, as was mentioned the machine hosting the page would need an Internet connection.

Since I am home on medical and still have a few weeks I decided to start messing with this. Talk about bored and cabin fever?

Anyway, if anyone has any suggestions I would be curious.

<EDIT> If anyone tries the script when you go to run it your browser may prompt you that the page has a script, it is OK to allow the browser to run the script and the prompt and warning are normal behaviour. </EDIT>

Ron

[jollyrgr]

I did this for my work several years ago. Still going strong, on second set of TVs. I used LCD TVs with VGA inputs. I used a plain old Windows computer. It can do Power Point or Windows Media Player etc. (Note I said second set of TVs. These being on 24/7/365 burned out the first TVs after about four years.)

Some HINTS:

• Make the desktop black.
  Auto-hide the taskbar
  Hide all of the desktop icons (there are tweaks for hiding the recycle bin)
  Set windows to AUTO REBOOT after a Blue Screen Of Death

(When the computer crashes the AUTO REBOOT hides the BSOD. If it gets rebooted due to power glitch all vistors see is a black screen. You can autostart your material if desired, I chose not to.)

Computer is not a power house. If I recall it is a 2GHz machine with 256MB of RAM. It will work with a lot less. I didn't opt for time and temp as there was a clock a few feet from the TVs. If this in a large facility you can put remote desktop software on the computer so you can remote to it from your desk over the network. My computer is in a telecom closet with the network switches.

Depending on how far away the computer is from the TVs you may want to consider using a VGA to CAT5 (note: NOT Ethernet, just CAT5 cabling) adapter. I used the ones from Blackbox that does both sound and video. You can daisychain these for hundreds of monitors. Likely you will never need that many but the devices I used were meant for airports and bus stations.

If this is in a location where people can get to the TV you may want to consider using the "child lockout" features and lock all of the broadcast channels out. I know after the "Big Football Game", opening season of baseball, World Series, etc. I have to make sure the TV is back on the PC input as people "play" with these.

[Engineer1138]

Time & temperature are trivial. As you stated, time can come from the PC. Temperature can be read by any number of sensors on the market at fairly low prices. A long time ago I used to make an RS232 temperature sensor that was sold to sign companies (including Yesco that does the huge las Vegas signs), but now you can find the sensors for under $50 easily. Bottom dropped out of that market

Weather? I'm hard pressed to understand why weather would be necessary unless the sign is deep inside a building that people can't see out of. In any case, you can get weather from a number of local weather sites.

If you are just looking for an electronic sign that can show specials, etc, without live data, there are some televisions that can take a USB thumb drive with pictures and the TV turns into a digital picture frame by cycling through all those pics. That's probably about the simplest way of doing it.

[Lenp]

Hi Guys,

This has been an interesting thread but a question arises. What is an easy way to rotate the screen data 90 degres so the display can be used vertically as usually seen on airport arrival/departure boards?

Len

[SETEC_Astronomy]

Hi Guys,

This has been an interesting thread but a question arises. What is an easy way to rotate the screen data 90 degres so the display can be used vertically as usually seen on airport arrival/departure boards?

Len

In Windows and Ubuntu Linux it's as simple as checking a box or selecting a desired rotation from a dropdown listbox.

[reloadron]

Hi Guys,

This has been an interesting thread but a question arises. What is an easy way to rotate the screen data 90 degres so the display can be used vertically as usually seen on airport arrival/departure boards?

Len

I am not quite sure what you are asking. Now yes, per SETEC_Astronomy you can easily rotate a page on a monitor usually using the graphics drivers tools. However, airport arrivals and departures use a standard landscape view with the data (flight information) arranged in tables. Tables provide the look I think you are referring to.

Ron