Story
Features:
- 29 news feeds – Top Stories, World, and Canada Regional
- 15 news items per feed
- It takes about 90 minutes to cycle through the full news set
- Each news item has “more” information that can be displayed on request.
- Will run offline with stored news
- Can run on continuous power (current uptime is 8 weeks 4 days)
- Even with only the dumb keypad & 2×16 display, it can connect to a local wifi access point, with password, or web login
Reason for Building
“Worst case of scope creep I’ve ever seen.” -Ron Grimes February 1, 2017
It started with a Raspberry Pi and the dumb 4×3 keypad, and a question: “I wonder if I can drive the keypad?” Well, Yes, after some tries, and some inspirational code from GitHub (I hope to give credit if/when I find the original source again).
Same thing with the 2×16 Parallax display unit: “I wonder if I can drive that too?”. Well, Yes.
Next question: “Um, what to display?” A stock ticker is boring (well, to me, anyway), and I wanted somethin
g that was changing steadily – not too fast, or slow. So, News was the answer, and I’d found the CBC RSS feed sometime in my travels on the Interwebs.
And from there the project grew… and grew…
Other questions to me (and answers):
- How do I parse RSS data [completed]
- How can I to run on continuous power so I don’t lose Uptime [completed]
- How do I to use shrinkwrap insulation [completed]
Read More: The Chocolate Box News Reader