crablab / vfd

Webserver for the Infosystems VFD

Infosystems Display

The backend for the Infosystems VFD display that is located in the bar at EMF 2024.

It's from a German tram and made in 2000.

Hostname: vfd.display.crablab.uk

Demosite

There's a demo available at vfd.display.crablab.uk/demo. This provides a basic interface to interact with the display.

Controlling the display

Two endpoints are provided:

• /time - displays an updating clock
• /message - takes POST data to display a message

The /message endpoint takes the following form data:

• message - text to display (up to 48 chars)
• effect - chase or split
• wipe - True/False

eg.

curl vfd.display.crablab.uk/time

curl vfd.display.crablab.uk/message -F message=Hello,\ World! -F effect=split

If the display returns a 409 then it's busy serving another request. Keep trying?

Run locally

pip3 install flask pyfis markdown pygments
flask --app main.py run

Contributions

Improvements are welcome. I spent about an hour making a very minimal interface.

Huge thanks to Cato who supplied both the IBIS interface and the library to send Telegrams.