DRIS Display

Dris Display retrofitting
Participants	Melan
Skills	1337 Skillz
Status	Getting parts
Niche	Electronics
Purpose
Tool	No
Location	Not at the space for now
Cost	Free.99
Tool category	Electronics

Dris Display retrofitting

DRIS.jpg {{#if:No | [[Tool Owner::{{{ProjectParticipants}}} | }} {{#if:No | [[Tool Cost::Free.99 | }}

What in the hark is this?

This is a Dynamic Passenger Infromation Display (DRIS) We got one from the Province since they are upgrading them to newer units.

Pictures

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  The entire unit in it's case

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  First look of the led panels

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  Guts spilled on the table in zaal 2, showing the led's busbars

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  PC booted and dumping the ide dom to an image

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  The 5v power supply powering the controller board

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  Filtering used on the 230V input

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  Temperature sensor of sorts

• 

Plan

In order to get this unit working we first will have to fix the broken 3V 25A power supply, or buy a replacement. Another issue is that the computer seems to post but then just shows a black screen and does nothing. I still have to figure out if this is due to the panel itself not working yet, or has other problems. It does seem that it does not trigger the watchdog on the "modem board" causing the "modem board" to constantly power cycle the computer.

Information gathered

Hardware

Power supply

• Tracopower 12v / 6.0a (Supply for IO)
• Tracopower 3.3v /  ? (Supply for Leds ) BROKEN
• Tracopower TMT 15105C 5v (Supply for led and FPGA board)

Controller Board

Main controller board which is connected to the led panel. Seems to communicate over serial with the build-in PC. The heart of the board seems to be a ST10f276Z5Q3 which is a 64Mhz 16-bit MCU. The UART seems to be handled by a TL16C550CIFN.

So far from glancing around we found that:

• It is NOT a FPGA but instead has a 16bit MCU
• It has a RTC
• It has both RS422 and RS485
• It has ethernet
• It has various IO of which the following devices are connected to it
• A temperature sensor
• A light sensor
• A sense for the bus bar for the leds

Unknown modem board

I haven't been able to detect a serial number yet. It has a sim slot with a KPN sim card in it and is connected to the PC with two com ports. It also seems to act as a watchdog as the PC's power is directly connected to it and it reboots the PC. Seems to be powered by a 32 Mhz Atmel ATXMEGA128XA1

Led Panel

The unit consists of 13x 32x16 amber coloured led panels. Each of these panels has it's own FPGA, an Altera Cyclone 2. Interesting of note is that one of them has a sticker on them saying "led_matrix.pof 27.02.2007".

It's a huge shame that these panels are running of FPGAs as that means we have no way of just controlling them since we know nothing about the protocol that they use to communicate with the other board.

• 
• 

  You can clearly see the Altera Cyclone

PC

The PC is running an Intel Atom NZ70 running at 1,60Ghz and 1GB of DDR2 ram. The OS is located on a 4GB IDE DOM. The motherboard is a Jetway NF95A-270-LF.

OS

It's running Windows XP Embedded the controller software seems to be written in Java. The watchdog seems to constantly reset the PC, but likely it has a 12v barrel jack making it able for me to power it off a 12v brick and dump the ide dom.

The raw disk image of the IDE dom can be found on Harmony under "shared_nurds_folder/Dris Display" along with the extracted partitions with zip. Please refrain from putting this data online on the internet as it contains sensitive data!