| 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.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
The entire unit in it's case
First look of the led panels
Guts spilled on the table in zaal 1, showing the led's busbars
PC booted and dumping the ide dom to an image
The 5v power supply powering the controller board
Filtering used on the 230V input
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.
What we could do is to power up one single, a few or just all the led panel using a PC power supply. We have a few laying around that seems to be capable of delivering at least 14A on the 3.3v bus. Assuming that unit itself won't run the leds at full brightness as long as we make the light sensor believe that we are in the dark.
I also want to explore the files on the computer, and see what exactly makes the system tick and how it communicates with the controller board. Another thing I might try is to see what the sim card will do when put in an Android phone.
Information gathered
According to the files located on the system, the panel was still operational at 2022-06-17.
Hardware
Power supply
- Tracopower 12v / 6.0a (Supply for IO)
- Tracopower 3.3v / 25A (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 and the motherboard is a Jetway NF95A-270-LF.
Software
OS
The system is running Windows XP Embedded and the software stack seems to be written in Java. 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 and the decompiled java source. Please refrain from putting this data online on the internet as it contains sensitive data!