Won 2nd place in National Level Electronics Design Contest !!!

Last month could have been never better without the "Electronics For you " design contest's results announcement. I was delighted to find my name at the 2nd place in the winner's list under Raspberry Pi category for my project named "Smiley-Pi". Very surprised that my previously discussed project in my blog turned out to be a prize winning project.

So what is it?

Smiley - Pi is a tiny Nokia caller LCD(extensively discussed here & here) based status notifier for Raspberry-Pi. The name is derived from a mode of operation where it uses various smiley images to indicate system information like temperature. The tiny 0.9", 96x65 monochrome caller LCD of Nokia 2760 is interfaced through bit-banged SPI to the Raspberry-Pi. The base driver application is coded in C and higher level in shell & Python scripts. The user application can use any language which can invoke the driver binaries in it.

Many times we would have felt that it is an overkill to drive a huge monitor just to see the IP address, CPU temperature or even a mail. For headless portable systems or people who don't have access to expensive monitors, this poses a problem. LCD modules come to rescue at such times but 16x2-character LCD is not so impressive & Graphic LCDs are expensive. Hence I used Nokia caller ID LCD which I have extensively tested and thus fail proof.

Now, it can display any textual information or graphical information customized by the user. The applications are endless. Here I have used it in two modes; Mode 1 where smiley expressions are displayed based on CPU temperature and Mode 2 which displays textual information like IP Address, CPU Temperature, Date, Free memory, etc at boot time. A video player mode was also tested where one can play 96x65 resolution monochrome video in the LCD.

Other vital applications can be displaying the IP Address at boot time aiding SSH login sessions (tested), usage with python-feedparser or other mail handler libraries to display mail summaries (tested) or even facebook/twitter data. It can even be combined with speech libraries with few lines of script to make these smileys talk. When integrated with kernel, it can act as a separate terminal console. The gpio pins can also be modified through the macros according to user’s wish.

Now with quite an amount at hand, its time to upgrade my garage.!! :D

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