We all use WhatsApp group messages and that’s fine. But wouldn’t it be great to see your  group messages on a physical (dot) message board? And wouldn’t it be handy that selectable (IoT) services push information to your groups message board?

A few use-cases:
 

• You’re late and let your families know by displaying some message or image. They all know immediately without leaving the dinner table (and hopefully will save you some diner).
• All school/work Twitter/news feeds show up, everyone will notice (and can comment)
• Your car is fully charged and can be unplugged. The Raspberry PI monitoring power consumptions will let you know by flipping some dots on your message board.

The message board platform is built with 2018-IoT-Technology-That-Matters including MQTT, WebSocket’s, Restful, ESP32 and MEAN stack. All kinds of displays can be interfaced even strange ones like a Hanover flipdot (reversed engineered it with some help of the internet, check out the BitBucket code)

Features:

• ESP32 (Pico V4) driving (LED) matrix displays. In this proof of concept the ESP32 drives an old 'Hanover flipdot display' using RS485
• ESP32 implements a user-friendly IP assignment by implementing a customized configuration webportal based on the excellent WiFiManager library.
• ESP32 drives an WS2812B smart LED providing feedback
• ESP32 acts as a MQTT client that subscribes to display specfic plain text (messages) and bitmap messages. This makes it possible to have 'groups'
• Proof of concept MEAN stack webapp implementing MQTT for publishing messages to the LED displays, Websockets to update other connected apps and RESTful to query previous send messages and LED display signatures 
• Displays clears after some time, NTP time (with daylight saving;) is displayed
• Python (example) script that can be executed by backends / Domoticz / HA / AI to publish messages or images to specific message displays.

Opensource @ BitBucket