Product Review: Pro-Lite Scrolling Message Signs

In order to display one or more messages at a time, the sign includes ten timers named A to J. Each timer specifies a time and a series of 1 to 32 pages to sequence through. You may repeat pages in a sequence. The time a sequence is displayed consists of a weekday, an hour and a minute, any of which may be wildcarded (*) to match “all”.

When the first timer is defined, the sign is put into “timer” mode and will display that timer's messages immediately. Should two or more timers be defined, the sign seems to wait one minute, then checks each timer to see if one triggered based on the current time. If so, at the end of the displaying message, the new timer's sequence goes into effect. If no rule matches, no change is made.

Note the sign checks the rules for the immediate time. It will not go back to try to find a previous timer. So if you set a timer for 4:15PM and it is now 4:17PM, you've missed the moment when the sign would change.

Should two or more timers both be valid for the current time, the sign unpredictably selects one for display. This means you cannot set one timer to display at 4:15 and another timer to display at 15 minutes past any hour. Both rules would be triggered at 4:15 and it is a toss-up as to which message will be displayed.

The timer command is defined as <Tx>dhhmmABC..., where x is the timer, d is 0 (Sunday) to 6 (Saturday) for the day, hh is a two-digit hour and mm is the minute. “ABC...” is a list of 1 to 32 pages to display in the order specified. Note that Page-A and Timer-A are two different, unrelated entities. A timer set for “*****” will be triggered immediately.

The following sequence will display a series of messages at 8:00AM, noon, 1:00PM and 5:00PM:

$ cat > /dev/prolite
<ID01>
<ID01><PA>Good morning.
<ID01><PB>Have a nice lunch.
<ID01><PC>Get back to work.
<ID01><PD>Have a safe drive home.
<ID01><TA>*0800A
<ID01><TB>*1200B
<ID01><TC>*1300C
<ID01><TD>*1700D
ctrl-D

In order to display a whole sequences of pages, just list more page letters. For instance, it is useful to make a scheme where you assign page letters to different message content. For example, page A could be hourly announcements, page R the runtime status of your machine, page M the message of the day, page T the time and so on. To display several pages right now (including repeats):

$ cat > /dev/prolite
<ID01>
<ID01><TA>*****TAMARA
ctrl-D

echo "<ID01><DTx>" > /dev/prolite

There are 26 graphic blocks that can be redefined and are commonly used for graphics. Graphics are inserted into the text via the tag <Bx>, where x is a letter from A to Z. For example, this command will display a mug and a wine glass:

echo "<ID01><PA><BW> Party Tonight <BZ>"
>\
   /dev/prolite

Altering the graphics requires the <Gx> command followed by a string of 126 characters made up of R (for red), Y (for yellow), G (for green) and B (for black or unlit). A sequence of seven rows of eighteen LEDs is specified back to back on a single command line. (See Figure 4.)

Figure 4. A Graphics Block Specification

I know at least one user who loads a font into a sequence of graphic blocks, and in this way is able to display more characters than the sign technically allows by default—very clever.

To delete a graphic block, restoring it to the default, use <DGx>, where x is a letter A to Z; * is a wildcard indicating all are to be deleted.