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.

  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″, 96×65 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 16×2-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 96×65 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.!! 😀