Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
Over to You
It is now over to you to make your own additions and improvements to this project. A simple
improvement would be to make the
mirror
function work even when the display is not
scrolling. his can easily be done by testing the variables that determine if the display is
scrolling and if not calling the
drawScreen
function.
One feature not included in the software is an indication of what word or line should be
being said at any time. You can do this in many ways, but the simplest is to make all the text
a slightly less bright shade of grey with the middle line in the display being full white. You
could also experiment with alternative colours or highlighting individual words.
On the system I made, the text would have itted better on the TV if the display were turned
around by 90°, so you could change the code to do this. Can you think how this would be
done? Hint: here is a
pygame.transform.rotate()
function in the box.
If you don't like the system I used to physically make the project, have a look online. here
are numerous suggestions for alternative methods of construction.
On the control side you can use some of the hardware input techniques covered in later
chapters to build your own handheld controller to pause and change the speed of the scroll-
ing. Whatever you do you can say with conidence, “Good evening. Here's the news”.
