Skroly - The Information Page.
Click here "for Skroly uses.
Click Here
for the Skroly Personal Marquee kit version. Build your own.
Skroly is a battery operated electronic marquee sign with 512 light emmiting diodes driven by 8 MAX7219
display drivers driving 8 rows by 8 colums each. These drivers are serial devices which daisy chain and are
driven in turn by an Arduino Nano microprocessor. Each time a new vertical line of 8 of the led's is shifted
in from the right a new 512 bits are shifted through the registers. Also attached to the microprocessor is an
SD card reader using the Arduinos SPI Bus and a bluetooth to serial adapter known as an HC-05 which is connected
to a soft serial port on the Arduino. The whole device is placed in a transparent plastic package and supplied
power through the Arduino 5 volt mini USB connection.
While The Skroly personal Marquee is touted to work with a cell phone it will work as a stand alone device. You
may update a single file on the SD Card using any computer sytem with whatever info you'd like to display reinsert
the SD card and and the Skroly will display any text information in that file.
The Skroly project started as an experiment to control an eight by eight red led display using an Arduino.
I got that to work with a single pattern then I tried to put text and numbers on it. Once that was working
I wanted it to be longer than a single digit. So, I expanded the number of letters / digits first to four then
to eight. Then I made it work on an Arduino nano. I tried to connect a Wifi transceiver, but bluetooth seemed the
best solution to control it. So I switched to an HC-05 bluetooth adapter. The next step was to get it to work on an
Android phone / tablet. It took a while but the software finally was coming together.
There are more things I'd like to do with the Skroly like having a network feed button so it will scroll
time / temperature / weather / ticker quotes / stock price / traffic or many other types of data the Skroly
would be suited to display. Further, I'd like to get it working on the iPhone and that could be in the works soon.
So please drop by to check for software upgrades downloads etcettera.
So, when it all started working reasonably well on the Android, I built a few for my friends just to see what they
thought. So far the response has been very positive so I'm just continuing to build more. Using mainly off the shelf
parts and software I developed. There is a circuit board I designed that helps speed up assembly and makes the whole
thing rather rigid. I can currently build, program and test a max of about thirty Skrolys each week although I'm
only building about ten each month presently. I will be selling them on ebay and elsewhere as I complete more.
The Skroly personal marquee retails for $99.99 I am currently offering them for sale on ebay at that price. If you
see the potential of this product and would like to become a distributor I can give you a $20.00 discount
with the purchase of 10 or more. I also hope to soon be offering a kit Skroly.
It will sell for $59.99 all parts included or just the parts list and instructions will be available for $19.99.
You may also purchase individual parts like the CCC motherboard from the Skroly parts list for the
indicated prices or you may purchase them yourself online from various sources.
Order yours now.
Thanks for looking into the Skroly Personal Marquee..
Sincerely, Brian Vogl. aka Snackerdog...
