dizzyOS

I have an LED sign in my kitchen, and dizzyOS is what runs it. It’s a small Python program that I built like a toy operating system. There’s a kernel that handles the shared stuff (drawing to the display, fetching data, fonts, input), and then a handful of apps that each do one thing. A launcher cycles through the apps and animates the switch between them.

The hardware

The sign is two Adafruit 64×64 HUB75 panels chained together into one 128×64 screen. A Raspberry Pi drives them through an Adafruit RGB Matrix Bonnet.

I don’t want to be standing in the kitchen every time I change a font, so there’s also an emulator that swaps in for the matrix driver on my Mac. The same code draws into a browser window instead of the panels, and that’s where I do most of the work.

The apps

• Cafe Menu shows the Izzy’s Cafe menu, pulled from this site’s /izzys-cafe.json feed. If I change the menu here, the sign picks it up a minute or two later.
• Weather shows what it’s like outside, using Open-Meteo.
• Subway shows when the next trains are coming, from the MTA’s live feeds.

To add an app, you make a folder in apps/ with a render() function and add its name to config.yaml. The launcher takes care of the rotation, the frame loop and the transitions, so the app only has to worry about what to draw:

launcher:
  rotation:            # apps cycle in this order
    - cafe_menu
    - weather
    - subway
  default_dwell: 20    # seconds per app
  transition: slide    # or crossfade, wipe, none…

Here’s the feed the Cafe Menu app reads. It’s loaded live from this site, so it’s exactly what the sign has right now.