Probably a year or two ago, I bought a one of those Beta Brite Signs and made a Perl library to interface with it. My perl library wasn’t very good, so I’ve decided to port it to Ruby, and I’ve been able to get the interface even better in Ruby.
require 'betabrite'
require 'serialport'
include Sign
obj = SerialPort.new(0, 9600, 8, 1, SerialPort::NONE)
sign = BetaBrite.new
tf = BetaBrite::TextFile.new
tf.message = "Hello World"
sign.add tf
sign.write { |text|
obj.write text
}
I still think it can be improved, but I’m getting there. I’ve been able to get all of the colors working, the fonts working, and even draw custom pictures. I’ve submitted a project to RubyForge, and I should be able to release a gem for this soon.