USB LED Message board ticker

[coynzer]

I wanted to have a BTC exchange rate ticker on my desk that I can also see when I am not using my computer and the screens went into power safe mode (of course the computer itself has to be running). I found and bought a cheap programmable USB LED display which I thought could fit the purpose, the Dream Cheeky LED Message Board.
The default software is fun to play around with but as I needed something that is obviously not part of the default package I searched how I could use it with my own code and found an alternate driver for it written in C# that has support for plug-ins. I wrote the plug-in and use it for myself but I thought it makes sense to share it for other BTC nerds like me out there.

http://s8.postimg.org/5bpkx841t/bitcoin_ticker.jpg

Features

• Works for various fiat currencies and can easily be extended to support more (basically every ticker that Mt.Gox provides)
• Shows the last trade price in a given fiat currency, updated every 5 seconds
• A change in price is shown by an animation: the new price scrolls in from above if it is a higher price or from below of it's a lower price than the last
• Refresh rate is configurable, animations can be disabled
• Uses as much as possible of the display area, for smaller numbers more fractional digits are shown
• Automatically rounds the number so that it fits the display

Prerequisites
To use this plug-in you need the Dream Cheeky LED Message Board. I am not related to Dream Cheeky in anyway and won't be able to give you any support for the hardware itself or answer questions about where to buy it.
Furthermore you need this alternative USB LED driver. Again I am not related to the developer of this software and cannot give you any support for it.

Download and usage
View Source
Download
The proposed file extension for the download is .txt - you need to change this to .cs so that the resulting file name is coynzer.BTCTicker.cs and save the file to the same folder where the LedMatrixDriverApp.exe from the alternative driver is. Afterwards start the USB LED Driver software (or if it is already running click the "Reload" button) and you should see new BTCTicker entries for various currencies.

Support
I wrote this for myself and don't plan on doing full-time support here. But of course I might be willing to answer questions (just ask) and if you find problems and report them I probably want to fix them and provide an the updated version.
Also feel free to extend the plug-in and post your improvement here, if I like it I will link to your modified version from the main post.

[coynzer]

Reserved for later use

[chsados]

Are you able to post a video up on youtube?  Would love to see this in video format.

Would this be able to be ran on linux - specificity a raspberry pie?

[coynzer]

Are you able to post a video up on youtube?  Would love to see this in video format.

Would this be able to be ran on linux - specificity a raspberry pie?

The only thing a video could show better than a picture is the animation. But it is really only a simple and boring vertical scroll animation, maybe you are expecting a little too much here. You won't put this on your desk and watch it instead of a movie (except you are incredibly excited about the exchange rate anyway  ). So right now I think I am too lazy to do a video for just that. Also there are videos of such message boards on Youtube already, just search them.

The base program (and therefore also my plug-in) is based on .NET which means it should be possible to run it using the Mono framework on Linux as well as a Mac. However, I haven't tried, so far I only tested it on Windows.
A quick search came up with this so apparently it is possible to run Mono on a Raspberry PI though I think it's a lot of overhead for the poor small thing. Also it is a GUI application so you will need to run a desktop environment on it.
Regardless of that if I find the time I will do a test with my board on Linux and report the results here.

[coynzer]

I tried and unfortunately I found out it doesn't run on Linux. To begin with, no extra plug-ins beside the original ones are selectable. And the other big problem: even for these nothing is shown on the USB board, the application also doesn't show any error message that would give me a hint on where to search for the problem.
As the host program is not my software I cannot do anything about that, sorry 

[Ecurb123]

thats really cool, I was thinking about making this with Raspberry pi, but this looks easier.

[devthedev]

Any chance this can be modified for BTC-E? I just got my display in the mail!

Thanks in advance (There may even be a bounty involved)

[ranlo]

Any chance this can be modified for BTC-E? I just got my display in the mail!

Thanks in advance (There may even be a bounty involved)

As a heads-up, there's similar discussion here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=609059.20;topicseen

For anyone that's interested.

[devthedev]

As a heads-up, there's similar discussion here: https://bitcointa.lk/threads/kickstarter-idea-bitcoin-price-led-ticker.314239/

For anyone that's interested.

Yep, the LED display I got from DreamCheeky was pretty crappy and just stopped responding after a few days.
Posted from Bitcointa.lk - #1OJJfOuoibXJDz1p

[JackTackett]

Check these out.  The only issue is they are a lot more than 30$.

http://www.neoplexonline.com/led-sign/

Jack