Personal Display

The Personal Display project is very simple.  It essentially takes a standard serial display, used frequently by case modders, and places it in an interesting and attractive housing to create both a functional experimental peripheral and a compelling desk objet.

I have added several interesting capabilities to the standard serial display, including selectable backlight color (so one could assign a unique light color to each of several data elements being tracked) and pushbutton inputs.  In addition, the final design will be a four-line display for greater utility.

This simple peripheral has a host of interesting potential applications, from the standard CPU temp or CPU loading or number of emails waiting, to telematic experiments: what if you assigned control permission to a friend, so the display becomes their person communication channel to you?  If they could control the backlight color and the text, it could get interesting. 

Additional typical applications include the tracking of network data, news feeds, etc.

I'll post the hardware design, protocol and software examples here in the next few months.  Stay tuned.

Related project idea: is anyone interested in helping develop an advanced version of this system based on a Palm, so full color image display is possible?  A model with a camera would open up telematic possibilities even further.  If so, drop me a line.