Luminator Signs

[teknomad]

So, i now have a bus.... !
However, it is constantly telling people to Call 911. Its like it knows what horrors await it during conversion.

The "Luminator" control panel for the LED displays is password-locked and the previous owner is unwilling to let me know the password to unlock it. Their garage is also located 2 hours away and wont come change it for me because they're government workers and thats not what they do.
And i certainly cant drive a bus back to them with "CALL 911" flashing on all sides. LOL

Fortunately, this Emergency display only triggered after we arrived at the conversion site, when we were fiddling with the buttons.

I've found the following threads discussing the Luminator signs:
https://www.skoolie.net/forums/f10/l...ign-16914.html
https://www.skoolie.net/forums/f10/l...tml#post289271

But they dont have a ready solution. I was hoping someone would know how to reprogram these using the official Luminator control panel. I would consider an arduino hack as a last resort, but i think this little control panel is pretty slick and would be nice to use. Im sure i can disable the sign in the mean time. But i would REALLY like to use this display.

Mine appear to be an LED version, with a mini-display on the back, and a narrow display on the side, in addition to the giant one on the front

[rossvtaylor]

Those are called destination signs and, unfortunately, if they're password protected (like they all seem to be) then I've not found a solution for that...shy of cutting off the power to it and leaving it "dead."

[peakbus]

Tape over them until you get a permanent fix.

[Bert06840]

Originally Posted by teknomad

So, i now have a bus.... !
However, it is constantly telling people to Call 911. Its like it knows what horrors await it during conversion.

Hahaha, hilarious. And welcome!

But yeah, that’s the silent alarm circuit.

[Bert06840]

Originally Posted by teknomad

So, i now have a bus.... !

Soooo... what did you get? Obviously not a school bus!

I was hoping someone would know how to reprogram these using the official Luminator control panel. I would consider an arduino hack as a last resort, but i think this little control panel is pretty slick and would be nice to use. Im sure i can disable the sign in the mean time. But i would REALLY like to use this display.

Mine appear to be an LED version, with a mini-display on the back, and a narrow display on the side, in addition to the giant one on the front

I just found out that Family Wagon has reverse engineered the protocol.. Of course we need to have to ask him/her for it!

https://www.skoolie.net/forums/f32/1...tml#post198689

[Bert06840]

If you're interested, I found this on Github:

https://alusch.github.io/flipdot-protocol/

Seems all very simple.

[Bert06840]

I just plugged mine in. Good to see it still works!

[Bert06840]

It seems to have a few default messages

[Bert06840]

Seems to correspond to the GitHub post!

[rossvtaylor]

Originally Posted by Bert06840

Seems all very simple.

Either you were being sarcastic or I'm way WAY too old! It sure doesn't look simple, to someone who learned about computers with punch cards. Haha!

[Bert06840]

Originally Posted by rossvtaylor

Either you were being sarcastic or I'm way WAY too old! It sure doesn't look simple, to someone who learned about computers with punch cards. Haha!

I'm sorry, I'm not trying to be an a-hole. It sometimes happens

But yeah I'm an electronics engineer, and electrically this is indeed simple. It uses a 50 year old communications protocol (RS-485)... At least, the internet says so! Of course, they may have locked it down... So it's possible you can send all the data you want and the sign says "yeah, I hear you loud and clear. But you don't have the secret handshake, so I'm going to do absolutely nothing!"

[rossvtaylor]

Originally Posted by Bert06840

I'm sorry, I'm not trying to be an a-hole. It sometimes happens

But yeah I'm an electronics engineer, and electrically this is indeed simple. It uses a 50 year old communications protocol (RS-485)... At least, the internet says so! Of course, they may have locked it down... So it's possible you can send all the data you want and the sign says "yeah, I hear you loud and clear. But you don't have the secret handshake, so I'm going to do absolutely nothing!"

A-hole never crossed my mind. I laughed. Thanks for that!

[family wagon]

Originally Posted by teknomad

However, it is constantly telling people to Call 911. Its like it knows what horrors await it during conversion.

The "Luminator" control panel for the LED displays is password-locked and the previous owner is unwilling to let me know the password to unlock it. Their garage is also located 2 hours away and wont come change it for me because they're government workers and thats not what they do.
And i certainly cant drive a bus back to them with "CALL 911" flashing on all sides. LOL

Not gonna lie.. the uncomfortable situation that accidental triggering of a silent alarm has made it necessary to hack the signs puts a smile on my face. I shouldn't laugh at the misfortune without also trying to help solve the problem though!

Obviously the most immediate way to end that problem is to unplug stuff. The SOS message must be generated by the Luminator ODK (operator display keypad? I think that's what they call it..); cutting power to that is probably all you'll need. If the messages persist though then unplug power from the signs too.

Originally Posted by Bert06840

Of course, they may have locked it down... So it's possible you can send all the data you want and the sign says "yeah, I hear you loud and clear. But you don't have the secret handshake, so I'm going to do absolutely nothing!"

I worried about that too. It turned out that, at least for the flip-dot generation of sign I have, Luminator kept things really buttoned up at the front gate but didn't carry through. The ODK contains a fixed set of messages and apparently even selecting one of those messages can be password-locked. Last I knew they were pretty tight with their software for loading messages into the ODK too. But there's no security, and not much obscurity either, on the wire between the ODK and the signs. It's like a government building with all manner of security theater at the front entrance and three side doors propped open for convenience.

The Luminator ODK looks nice but it isn't anything that can't be easily replaced with maker-friendly hardware. Besides, a person might want to throw up a message on a whim more conveniently than what reprogramming and ODK would allow.

[family wagon]

So.. get yourself RS-485 interface and have at it! I used an FTDI USB-RS485-WE cable, but there are any number of alternatives that'll work fine.

That write-up on github is really nice. Far better notes than I ever generated -- when I worked on it I captured a few interactions between my ODK and sign, looked at what was showing on the sign, and at length figured out that the data on the serial bus actually contained the images shown on the sign. I re-used the "bookend" data on both sides of the image data without knowing what it meant (except for the one message that sends the sign's bus address).

I wrote a dumb little program in C that would ingest a BMP image format, print it to the terminal with *'s to represent the active pixels, and output the image data in the intel hex format ready to be sent to the sign. I'd send it to the sign with a bunch of echo commands in a shell script.

My process went something like this:

1. create an image of the same pixel dimensions as my sign on a PC in BMP format (my tool only supported one flavor of BMP format; I don't remember if that was MS-paint or GIMP with the options set just so)
2. process the image through my program
3. write a shell script to echo the prefix data, image data, and postfix data to the sign
4. run the shell script

You were probably hoping for something a little more polished.. sorry!