Programmable LED Signs for Campus Buses
Engineering
SURF-IT
The purpose of this project is to design programmable LED route signs for UCSC campus buses. Our design involves an LED matrix used to display the route characters and a microcontroller that controls which rows and columns of the matrix are turned on. Additionally, we processed font files to generate data that is used to drive the correct LEDs to display the text. We have built a working miniature prototype which validates our design approach. Our next step is to develop a full-size prototype. This project is part of the UCSC Inter-Networking Research Group’s Bus Tracking System (BTS) project,whose major goals are to provide real-time bus location maps on the web and an ad-hoc networking test bed. In the future, the microcontroller used to power the LED sign will also wirelessly transmit route data to campus base stations.
