Grahame, Thank you for the idea. I looked at the proverb list on your site, but in the end I used a combination of several other lists that includes quotations. I have other kinds of list I've been putting together, including bible verses and latin epithets, but regrettably I have only one lifetime and many other things to do with it.
The basis of this clock was a full calendar that I wrote some years ago. It knows how to work out all the special days, including Easter, and has a variety of messages for all of them. Apart from what I put in, it will store user messages in EEPROM for birthday and anniversary reminders, etc. American calendar, though - perhaps I should do a British calendar version and send it to my mother. She would appreciate the bible verses. I made the prototype with some HP LED dot matrix displays I had laying around, HDSP2503 - simple parallel interface - but they cost nearly $50 each and the clock needs two, so my attention turned to the VFDs. I considered using compression, but I had 64k of flash available and found it difficult to fill it up even uncompressed. Besides, see comment above about number of available lifetimes. Here's a pic of the HDSP clock. I have a bag of Noritake graphic VFDs that I rescued from a dumpster, complete display, serial/parallel. I haven't quite decided what to do with them. It seems sacrilegious to waste them on text or numbers. Maybe I'll do a clock with rolling graphic numbers like an odometer. Pete <https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-T2Jb_ePgwnY/U7pg5AP7T1I/AAAAAAAAALo/0pzZDFZpsQs/s1600/HDSP+clock.jpg> > Pete, > > I'm glad you found the ideas useful. I have a much larger proverb list > which I chose from for my proverb generator when I became short of flash. > I can let you (or anyone else) have it to play with. It includes a lot of > other sayings, almost duplicates and the "Way of Mrs Cosmopolite" (Thief of > Time, Terry Pratchett). Also here > > http://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/index.php/The_Way_of_Mrs._Cosmopilite > > I also have a few hundred proverbs in French (somewhere). > > Did you use any compression for the text? I just about doubled the number > of proverbs I could fit in doing so. > > I have a few 20x4 Itron display but I have been seriously distracted by > scope clocks. They requires just 5V and generate all the required VFD > voltages and multiplex signals, and have a simple parallel interface. I > was going to use a SD card for text storage as simple ascii files so they > could be edited on a PC and then the SD card transfered into the > clock/proverb. With just a 1 MB card that is almost "infinite" storage. > > Cheers Grahame > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "neonixie-l" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/neonixie-l/edbc605a-1062-44b1-9697-9ff0fddc5dd6%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
