Markee
December 31st, 2014
Markee is a proof-of-concept project that allows friends and family to use the web to send messages across the "digital divide" to reach loved ones that have physical accessibility limitations that prevent them from using modern media like telephone calls, text messaging or email. The idea was presented to me by my friend Leo Kempf, who was in need of a way to send messages to his grandmother that cannot answer the phone. His design challenge for me was to build an LED marquee capable of receiving message updates over the Internet.
The concept is simple enough, but the implementation proved to be far more complicated than I anticipated. I ran into several problems with the basic hardware components before I could even address the design challenges. The rest of this article is a full tutorial on how to build it yourself and an in-depth description of the challenges I encountered along the way. This project requires basic soldering skills and a good understanding of Arduino, PHP, MySQL, HTML and Javascript.
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