Beta Brite Signs

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.