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Thursday 13 November 2014

New alerter

While I was rummaging around the cheaper end of Ebay (as one does), I found a 1280 by 1024 LCD monitor for only £25. And it does HDMI!

I thought about the little three inch screen I currently have my alerts on, and I thought, this is what I need.

It arrived today, and I have it in action now.

To use it, I set the framebuffer

framebuffer_width=1280
framebuffer_height=1024

And the HDMI mode
 
hdmi_force_hotplug=1
hdmi_group=2
hdmi_mode=35

The information displayed comes from my external temperature sensor, my mail server, and the Pi's clock.

I'm using Imagemagick to create the bmp file with the information, Then I convert that to a framebuffer format using ffmpeg. I have no idea why I needed to do that, but I couldn't see how to make Imagemagick create framebuffer formats. Then I copy the file to /dev/fb0.

Simples.



The alerts thing goes yellow if it's looking bad, and red if it's very bad. Red means that a server is definitely playing up, and needs to be checked out.

2 comments:

  1. I see that the monitor has speakers.. colours are good, but would beeps be helpful as well? I wonder if you can make the Pi connected to it play Chopin..

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  2. Actually, I've been thinking of using a voice synthesiser to speak the alerts when they get more than a couple of hundred. But there's downsides to that idea ...

    But I have interspersed the info display, with a view from a webcam over the front gate, except that is suppressed at night, using a program that calculates the times of sunset and sunrise.

    Because I can :-)

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