Custom Efficient LED Display Driver
Designing a dead-simple, 5V lightweight display controller using the open Disperanto protocol for mobile crowd control installations.
One of the companies I have worked with wanted to add LED panels of about half a square meter to mobile camera installations for crowd control purposes.
If they were to do this naively, it would include:
- 12V batteries (lots of them)
- 230V inverter
- 2 standard LED panels/cabinets (500x500mm)
- LED controller, like a MCTRL300
- Video player, like a Yodeck
- Crowd control software that can work with the player
- Power supply for video player
- Box to house that equipment in
- Plenty of cables
- Internet source, like LTE
And it would be without diagnostics, as the video player would only know if it’s outputting an HDMI signal and the controller needs a Windows computer to talk to.
Not only is this very power inefficient, but also cumbersome and expensive. Furthermore, all of this stuff costs money and time to buy and assemble.
What if life could be simpler?
The major manufacturers of LED receivers (critical translators between controller and LEDs themselves, say Colorlight and Novastar) have some products with built-in 4G. Unfortunately, they are quite out-of-date and often run old Android versions.
Furthermore, the crowd control software is quite a big deal and not easy to build or implement. Luckily, there is a company with a near monopoly on traffic control software in the Netherlands who so happened (were forced to?) open-source their display protocol. They creatively called it Disperanto, and documentation is available online. This protocol is very data-light and has enough flexibility to work for crowd-control purposes. Even better: this company has already implemented it in JavaScript for another project.
Therefore, a lightweight, 5V (like the LED displays themselves), dead-simple controller using Disperanto could be the key to making this work.
Life is best when we share, and I love it when someone else doing that saves me a lot of time—in this case, PanelPlayer by ZoidTechnology. It is able to drive Colorlight displays with WebP images and animations/videos.