I recently bought an Arduino to play around with, and wanted to find some semi-useful purpose for it (probably to justify the purchase). After doing some research, I found a project which gave me a bunch of great ideas.

Based on the code and basic components from this project, the idea was crafted: What I wanted was, a wall mounted, interaction free display, able to show different information from a configurable data source. The “simple” solution to this is to make it web-capable, and throw up some simple web server, serving pre-processed data at in properly sized chunks.

The code for the device is a work in progress, and will probably never be “finished”, but does currently support NTP-time synchronization, with cycling data feeds to come. Complete source code can be found at github. A lot of the display driver code, as well as some of the display library code is based on the “PS/2/You” project, mentioned above. The variable width font I created (because let’s face it, it’s just that much cooler), can be found here.

The parts list for this project should be pretty straight forward, but it might be worth to note that a lot of the code is pretty tightly tied in with the display I used.

• Arduino Uno R3: Anything Atmega328-ish will probably do, this I had lying around.
• Arduino Ethernet Shield: Probably any Wiznet W5100 will do, but the shield comes in handy together with the Uno.
• Project enclosure: Nice for keeping things tidy, specially cables.
• Four Sure P4 32X8 Green LED Dot Matrix displays: Great value for the price. Decent quality, and works well with the Atmega. (there’s no reason this setup shouldn’t work with fewer displays, but 4 in daisy chain is maximum supported out of the box).
• 5V voltage regulator, with proper amount of capacitors (display power supply).

Alas, for the last 5 or so years, my home server (though upgraded several times), and in part, my more or less stable internet connection, has housed anything I could throw at it. Mostly this has been used for ssh-connections, file/svn/git-hosting, and for the last couple of years, mail.

As I said, it’s a wonder it has worked as good as it has, but the moment I found out my server would be without connection for the better part of the week, it was time to reconsider some proper hosting. I’ve been considering a virtual private server for some time, and lately, I’ve heard a lot of good things (as well as it having a good price point) about Linode (shameless referral plug!).

After an hour or so from signing up, Trommelyd was running properly in a freshly installed Apache at a freshly set up Ubuntu install (seriously! <5 minutes from I decided to go for it to I sat there in root login!). A couple or so hours later, the first DNS-propagations started to hit DNS-servers, and the site started looking alive again, I started seeing hits in the logs, and my all my internet related worries started to fade away…

Anyways… What have I learned from all this?

1. Backup? Yes! I used it! While my home server was without internet, my off site backup was all and well and was willing to copy over all I needed to bring the site back up.
2. Norwegian Post’s effectiveness? Not so much. I’m still waiting on a callback as to why my VDSL modem was never delivered at time. Bah…
3. VPS, worth it? YES! Just on how streamlined the process was for setting the server up, the price point, what I have seen from hardware capabilities this far, I’m not looking back. Here is a snip from the HTTP-load time logs for both servers. This number doesn’t really tell all that much, but it should give some idea as to the capabilities of the new host. My old server, though no power horse, a dual core AMD-processor, has trouble keeping up with a VPS on shared awesome hardware (you notice the average load time is an order of magnitude lower).

The project is hosted on GitHub, and is licensed under GPLv3.

There are more features planned ahead.. Just you wait!