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My new toy .. Pertelian X2040.

Posted: Mon Mar 31, 2008 2:35 pm
by onion2k
It was my birthday last week*. As the happy recipient of some Amazon vouchers I decided to spend it all on something completely pointless. You can do that with birthday money, it's allowed. So I bought myself a Pertelian X2040 ... basically it's a 20 character, 4 line alphanumeric LCD screen that plugs into a USB port and displays messages.

The gadget: http://www.pertelian.com/joomla/index.p ... &Itemid=48

There's a little system tray app that controls it and runs a whole bunch of plugins ... obvious things like a world clock, notes, a whole raft of computer stats (CPU usage, memory, temperatures, etc), and the current Winamp/iTunes/WMP song title can be displayed. And RSS feeds. I've just thrown together a quick hack to take information from the log of one of my sites, parse it into an RSS format file, and configured the X2040 to grab it every 15 minutes and display it. Now when someone buys something from one of the stores I code I'm informed on a little screen on my desk! It's ace. What's even better is that it has global hotkeys which the RSS reader uses to launch the URL part of the RSS feed .. so when a new sale comes in I can press 'CTRL+ALT+Q' and got straight to the admin and view the order. Amazing stuff!

Of course, the next challenge it to write a C# plugin for the system tray application that can run a PHP script and display the output. Then it'll become really useful.

* Thankies for the messages everyone who remembered..

Re: My new toy .. Pertelian X2040.

Posted: Mon Mar 31, 2008 3:43 pm
by JayBird
Will it work with OS X?

Do want

Re: My new toy .. Pertelian X2040.

Posted: Mon Mar 31, 2008 4:09 pm
by onion2k
Not out of the box by the looks of things. It works with Linux (not tried it myself, going by the people on the forum), and there's lots of information around about writing standalone apps that write to it, so it might be possible...

Re: My new toy .. Pertelian X2040.

Posted: Mon Mar 31, 2008 5:37 pm
by Inkyskin
That looks pretty cool! If you could write it to show errors and notices while debuggin PHP... now that would rock

Re: My new toy .. Pertelian X2040.

Posted: Wed Apr 02, 2008 4:21 pm
by Josh1billion
onion2k wrote:I've just thrown together a quick hack to take information from the log of one of my sites, parse it into an RSS format file, and configured the X2040 to grab it every 15 minutes and display it. Now when someone buys something from one of the stores I code I'm informed on a little screen on my desk!
That's pretty sweet. :) I bet there are desktop apps that you could use to print straight to your desktop too, though.

Re: My new toy .. Pertelian X2040.

Posted: Wed Apr 02, 2008 5:16 pm
by onion2k
Josh1billion wrote:That's pretty sweet. :) I bet there are desktop apps that you could use to print straight to your desktop too, though.
That would mean either having something always-on-top over my PHP coding app, or having a pop-up on the taskbar. Both would annoy me.

Re: My new toy .. Pertelian X2040.

Posted: Wed Apr 02, 2008 5:20 pm
by alex.barylski
I've thought using those little LCD screens before. They are certainly neat. :)