Cyberpunk Advertising Signs

Many years ago (checks the calendar and realises it’s over ten years ago!) I hacked a few K838 digital photo frame keychains and got them to work with my microcontroller of choice (at the time) a PIC 18F4550.

I was encouraged to try a new business venture – a digital golf score-keeping device, that let players access live course information, record their scores and download them onto their computers for analysis through a website. The demand for such a device came because – at the time – use of mobile phones was strictly barred on golf courses (not just competitively, but many local courses had a no-phones policy).

I invented a device that could draw graphics and sprites onto the screens (which in turn came from a major mobile phone manufacturer so were relatively cheap to source) and store data in an external eeprom chip, along with a menu-based UI.

I booked a stand at the Golf Show in the London Excel Centre, had 500 units made and sent over from a factory in China and spent a week programming my custom-made devices with my own firmware, having spend three months on an all singing-all-dancing website.

Two weeks before the big launch and disaster struck – the ban on mobile phones was lifted and overnight rendered my new hardware useless. It had been replaced by an app (although nobody went on to create the app to replace my device, and I lost heart and didn’t bother myself).

This left me with hundreds of useless devices!

I re-programmed a few hundred and sold them on to a music shop in Italy, who turned them into digital instrument tuners. A few were sold to an industrial control panel manufacturer, to make a small-form user interface for their own hardware.

Many hundreds eventually ended up in landfill.

I never thought about them again. Until last week, when, rummaging through my loft looking for some old miniature paints, I came across a box with about thirty left over devices.

I was in the loft looking for crafting materials because I was building a cyberpunk city using mdf terrain for a tabletop skirmish game. I figured that if I could take just the screen and lose the enclosure, I could create some amazing Blade Runner-esque advertising hoardings.

The only trouble was, I had nothing else to work with. No code. No schematics. Nothing. Just a bunch of devices. And the knowledge that, once upon a time, I was clever enough to make them display my own images.

I was certain that if I was clever enough to do it once before, it shouldn’t be impossible to do it again – even if my brain is ten years older, carrying a decade more trivia and useless information, and ten years more tired!