How the LED Sign Works

Talking to the sign via Core-v4

Below is an architecture diagram on how we can control the sign from the website.

How to set up the sign to run

You will need:

• An ethernet cable
• A keyboard
• A monitor
• A mouse
• The LED sign

1: Plugging Everything in

1. Take the Ethernet cord and plug one end into the pi and the other into your router or ethernet port that you can find in ENGR 294.
2. Ensure that the pi has the black power cord plugged into it.
3. Take the black power cord and plug it into an outlet. The pi should light up.
4. Plug the keyboard and mouse into the USB ports of the pi and connect a monitor via HDMI to the pi.

If you have done the above step correctly, you should see an output on the screen like:

or

2: Interacting with the pi

1. Open a terminal on the pi
2. Run the command ifconfig and take note of the IP address of the pi (see below)
3. Doing ls, we should see a directory with a name like sce-led-sign.
4. cd into it, and doing it again we should see a file called led_sign_server.py
5. Run the file with sudo python3 led_sign_server.py. You should see something like

Started server. Listening on port <port number>

Connecting to the sign via SCE code

1. With the IP address of the pi, modify the LED_SIGN_IP field in client/config/config.js to contain the address in quotes. (Hint: make a copy of client/config/config.example.js if you haven't already.
2. In your SCE-RPC folder, run the API with npm start.
3. You should now be able to talk to the sign via Core-v4 when you run the website fully (see these steps)