Imagine being able to program your bumper sticker to say anything you want… CRAVE has a quickie about VW’s programmable electronic bumper sticker that “enables drivers to communicate real-time messages to other road users”… – Link.
There are a lot of ways to do this now (LEDs, e-ink…) and I bet we’ll see some from Makers -really soon-
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- LED car messages – Link.
6 thoughts on “Programmable bumper stickers”
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Neat sticker…But is that electric drive conversion in a split van?!? That kicks!
Neat sticker…But is that electric drive conversion in a split van?!? That kicks!
Neat sticker…But is that electric drive conversion in a split van?!? That kicks!
I’ve been working on a couple of concepts along this line. Originally I picked up a photo-frame and was just going to drop a card in it. I wanted to have a mount made for the frame to make it easier to keep in the window, but the guy I had making the mount never got back to me. I’ve resumed looking into the project recently, and find the biggest problem to be finding displays that are the longer width like a bumper sticker would be. Even 6:9 isn’t quite wide enough.
I’m working on a ‘cheap’ and ‘easy’ version at the moment using an RPi as the main driver, and have an A+ coming to dedicate to the project. I found an analog 7″ display for $20 on amazon from some china company that has two video inputs and I’ll hook the a+ in a small box directly to the back of it.
I do, however, have bookmarked a small LCD that is closer to the dimensions of a bumper sticker, but it’s a bit more pricy and comes with adapter boards for RPi, Arduino Uno and Arduino Mega in the $75-100 range. If I get enough extra play money by summer, I may revisit the project on Arduino using one of those wider displays instead.
My ultimate goal would be to do it on e-paper, however, as without the back-lighting it is not necessary to keep it ‘under power’ and would probably also be far easy to weatherize to use outside the vehicle or in a bumper (rather than setting in a window such as I plan to do with the LCD version)
I’ve looked into some of the development platforms, but don’t have enough EE experience to build my own driver hardware for displays even if I could find one of a size to my liking. Linksprite has a couple of smaller arduino shields available now in a much lower price range than previous e-paper displays I have seen for Arduino or other platforms. I may get one of their’s to play with. I’m not sure if you can swap out the actual display and change the settings or not. (I have learned enough to far to understand they are serial driven)