Hi All,
I'm a complete newbie here. I haven't bread-boarded a circuit since the late '70's, but figure I can still read a diagram and I can solder. Nonetheless, I'll need to have my hand held a lot on this one.
I'm building a project for a (very poor) developing nation in Africa that will show the status of non-networked remote computer stations on a big light up board. These computers will periodically send their operational status via cellular GPRS to an MSSQL database. I will define certain triggers on the database to report their status.
What I want is to be able to represent each computer using a tri-color 5mm LED on a large black board (one LED per computer) to show each computer's basic status. If the computer reports all functions ok, it's green. If it hits some error threshold, it's red. If it hits some warning threshold, it's yellow. This way we can have a bird's eye view of the nation. EVENTUALLY, the display will be a series of large computer screens, each representing a province in the country, so that we can click on a dot and get more detail about that particular computer station. For now, it'll just be an LED with a number under it, and we'll have to go to the computer and run a query on that number to get the details.
There are currently 500 of these computers scattered across the country. We can't afford to have an LCD computer screen large enough to show a whole nation, so I'm willing to wire a board the size of a wall with LEDs. I know it'll be a big hairy pain, but that's ok (Besides, it'll look cool to my African colleagues--think Lite Brites from when we were kids). We don't have the money to hire someone to do this. All our computer development and deployment is being done in-house.
I guess I need three things (perhaps this forum can only provide me with the first one?):
1. A circuit design that can drive 500 5mm LEDs with any of three possible states for each individual LED: Green, Red, Yellow. This board should take USB or COM port serial input, although it would also be fine to use the RJ-45 jack on the NIC.
2. A computer application that can consume output from an MSSQL report, multiplex that output, and send it to the computer port specified above.
3. The format that the SQL report should be for #2. I will write the SQL query to produce that format.
If #2 and/or #3 are beyond the scope of this forum, then I would need input specs for #1.
Thanks all for helping this poor newbie!
Chrys
I'm a complete newbie here. I haven't bread-boarded a circuit since the late '70's, but figure I can still read a diagram and I can solder. Nonetheless, I'll need to have my hand held a lot on this one.
I'm building a project for a (very poor) developing nation in Africa that will show the status of non-networked remote computer stations on a big light up board. These computers will periodically send their operational status via cellular GPRS to an MSSQL database. I will define certain triggers on the database to report their status.
What I want is to be able to represent each computer using a tri-color 5mm LED on a large black board (one LED per computer) to show each computer's basic status. If the computer reports all functions ok, it's green. If it hits some error threshold, it's red. If it hits some warning threshold, it's yellow. This way we can have a bird's eye view of the nation. EVENTUALLY, the display will be a series of large computer screens, each representing a province in the country, so that we can click on a dot and get more detail about that particular computer station. For now, it'll just be an LED with a number under it, and we'll have to go to the computer and run a query on that number to get the details.
There are currently 500 of these computers scattered across the country. We can't afford to have an LCD computer screen large enough to show a whole nation, so I'm willing to wire a board the size of a wall with LEDs. I know it'll be a big hairy pain, but that's ok (Besides, it'll look cool to my African colleagues--think Lite Brites from when we were kids). We don't have the money to hire someone to do this. All our computer development and deployment is being done in-house.
I guess I need three things (perhaps this forum can only provide me with the first one?):
1. A circuit design that can drive 500 5mm LEDs with any of three possible states for each individual LED: Green, Red, Yellow. This board should take USB or COM port serial input, although it would also be fine to use the RJ-45 jack on the NIC.
2. A computer application that can consume output from an MSSQL report, multiplex that output, and send it to the computer port specified above.
3. The format that the SQL report should be for #2. I will write the SQL query to produce that format.
If #2 and/or #3 are beyond the scope of this forum, then I would need input specs for #1.
Thanks all for helping this poor newbie!
Chrys