Second Place
LED News Ticker
James Blackwell
U.S.
The handy LED News Ticker brings the news to you by displaying up-to-date headlines in a scrolling format. The system features a main board and eight slave boards attached to dot-matrix LED displays. The main board features a Microchip Technology PIC18F2525 microcontroller connected to a WIZnet WIZ810MJ Ethernet module, which uses the W5100 to provide an easy-to-use interface to the Internet. The LED News Ticker requires no interaction to operate. Once powered up, the device immediately connects to the Internet and downloads news updates every 15 minutes. It handles all DHCP leasing and DNS resolving, allowing you to use dynamic IP addresses.
“My project is an Internet-enabled news ticker. It downloads news headlines from the web and scrolls them across a 64 × 8 LED array. The project consists of a main board that communicates to eight individual slave boards. The main board is fairly simple, using only a PIC18F2525 and a WIZ810MJ module to connect to the Internet. Each slave board piggybacks to a single 8 × 8 dot matrix LED display, which is controlled by a PIC18F2221. The main board scrolls news headlines across the display by manipulating data in a frame buffer that is sent to the slave boards. The WIZnet modules really simplified the design of my system without sacrificing any usability. I plan on using them in future projects as well.”—James Blackwell
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