Electronic Name Badges.

[Colin McGregor]

One of the ideas that got briefly kicked around
earlier was the idea of having electronic name badges
for the likes of the IT360 show. This would be along
the lines of what I did a number of years ago for a
science fiction convention where I connected up a
Parallax BASIC Stamp (ultra low-end controller) to a
16 character x 1 line LCD display to show various
(funny) messages. This was an idea that worked out
reasonably well (yes, there are a few things I would
do different if I were doing it all again, and if
there is interest I would be happy to note the things
I thought were less than ideal about what I did first
time out...).

A few days ago I ran across a print out of the source
code for that I used for the name badge... Yesterday I
was in briefly at Linuxcaffe, and there seemed to be
SOME real interest in this as an idea. So, to restart
discussions, let me toss out some questions:

- Is this a project that would be of general interest?
- If this were to happen, each person would likely 
  have to pay for his/her own badge (likely too 
  expensive for GTALug to pay for), are people ok 
  with this?
- If so, is there a more cost effective LOW end 
  controller option than the BASIC stamp?

The specs./prices on the stamp can be seen here:

  http://www.parallax.com/detail.asp?product_id=27100

There are a number of nice things going for the stamp,
namely:

- fairly low cost
- programmable in a high level language, BASIC
- 8 I/O lines
- On board 9v battery clips/voltage regulator
- Low power consumption
- Software development tools available for Linux 
  (which I have not tried, the only tools available 
  when I did this were for MS-DOS...).

There are also some very real limitations:

- 256 bytes (NOT K bytes, bytes) of program storage,in

  EEPROM which must cover code and messages (the
driver
  program plus messages of up to about 170 character
  can be stored in that space...).
- The size of a 9v battery, which while not large is
  bigger than ideal for this application.

In other words the ideal controller would have the
same pluses (though cheaper would be nice), much more
EEPROM space, and smaller. Also, while the 8 I/O lines
is enough (I could feed data out to the LCD screen 4
bits at a time, thus allowing for the control lines),
11 I/O lines could make the code simpler...

Ideas folks?

Colin McGregor

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