There was a time when I was logging a whole lot of highway miles. And, during my travels, I thought about the possibility of making a device where I could display custom messages to my fellow motorists.
After all, driving can be kind of lonely sometimes and a simple message like this could help make someone’s day.
I finally got the time to sink my teeth into this project and the results were surprisingly good!
As usual, I turned to my old Buddy – the Raspberry Pi – to power a 32×32 LED matrix. After importing a couple of Open Source libraries and writing some Python scripts, I was off to the races. I was really surprised at the kind of resolution it can achieve … and the vivid colors are perfect for this time of year!
I can change the messages using a Python application I created on the Pi.
The possibilities to improve this are endless. I am now working on expanding this to display custom text that a driver types into the interface (when they are pulled over, of course), as well as accepting feeds from Facebook and Twitter.
Don’t worry!! I’ll keep you all updated!!