Hi, some friends and I are brainstorming some ideas for a bus arrival board that utilized a boron so we can remotely display message updates.
There are a few existing setups folks have done that used wifi based ones, ex. photon, but I think having a fully remote and deployable cell based one would be a sweet updage. Most of the bus boards use an RGB Board, which only now I've learned the Boron doesn't support.
Does anyone have any big displays they'd recommend for text display or a workaround that gets around the Boron's lack of hardware support? The RGB matrix hit a sweet spot in price and available libraries. The alternate, maybe, could be getting a second microcontroller like the raspberry pico, photon... for the boron to talk TO. The boron would be a dummy device that would receive particle functions and pass them to the display device. Seems a little cumbersome and more $ and labor... but not unlike some projects I've done.
I did get something working with this over the weekend. My solution was a simple microcontroller, in my case I had a raspberry pico lying around that I wired via a featherwing RGB matrix display adapter into the display. I think the end hardware setup would be a featherwing based microcontroller to talk to the boron since there's a featherwing based adapter for the RGB matrix. I'll figure some easy way to mount the two together and connect the required 5v between the 3 components.
In the end, the Boron is not much more than a gateway to cell signals. I call a particle function with the message I want (Downtown, 2min, on_time;). This gets passed over serial to the Pico/Adafruit feather/microcontroller. The microcontroller digests it and puts it up on the screen.
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That is an option.
In the future, the M-HAT will be available which is a stackable Raspberry Pi HAT so you can stick it on top of a Pi with a 40-pin expansion connector and it supplies cellular connectivity without any loose wires. You can still stick a regular HAT on top of that, as well.
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