Why I Made This
Sometimes, you just get an urge to build something, and it doesn’t matter that "no one else would ever want one," and "you can look that up on the Internet." The lure of my favorite theme park was simply so strong I had to create this device to stay connected to my favorite place on earth.
It took almost a year to develop in my spare time, but it was worth it, even if only a handful of people share my enthusiasm. I love picking a different park each day and imagine myself going on each ride as it scrolls by. After six months of running test units continuously it hasn’t gotten old yet!
How could something as simple as this take so long? The hardware to run the display cheaply enough to keep the cost under $200 was single-threaded, meaning it could only do one thing at a time. But the device needs to scroll wait times, run a web server for the GUI, and update wait times all at once. It’s not a trivial problem, especially when so many of the low-level routines lock up the CPU.
The next challenge was to update the code live from the field so customers could get bug fixes and enhancements at the click of a button. Without that, people would either be stuck with one version or go through a complicated, multi-step upgrade procedure. This wasn’t trivial, either, and there is almost a hundred software libraries that need to be updated at the same time to match the new features, along with fonts, images, and the code.
The final piece of the puzzle was making it work reliably 24/7. As it turns out, this was the hardest of all, as the board's firmware had bugs that caused regular crashes. It took months of debugging with the platform engineers to get fixes into a new major firmware release that finally allowed it to run continuously.
What didn’t make it into the first release is animated graphics and fancy fonts. The 64x32 LED display is cute and fun, but animated sprites require a lot of trial and error. It was difficult to tear myself away from doing something fun like animation and focus on the tedious work of tracking down bugs that only showed up after the box had been on for a week, but the latter had to be done.
Hopefully it ended up being a true Minimally Viable Product, something that does what it needs to do. But now that the basics are working, I want to hear from the crazy few who think this is a fun idea about what to add next. Here are a few ideas of my own for new features. Let me know which ones to tackle first, and of course, I always want to hear about new ideas.
- Animated sprites for the wait time display for the more famous rides
- Time and weather updates for the selected park
- More extensive versions with 2 or 4 64x32 displays so you can keep tabs on multiple parks at the same time
Thanks for being a fan of theme parks, no matter which one,
B.S. Electrical & Computer Engineering
The Ohio State University