Here it is, hardware all done
This year it is powered by two devices, a Raspberry Pi on a Red Board and an Arduino on a black board.
The Raspberry Pi will drive these three message boards, a naughty and nice list will scroll through Santa’s list.
I bigger display will show Christmas messages during the holidays.
I had to darken the photo, but this display shows how many days and hours till Christmas.
Its weird, but there are reasons why I went to two devices. The Pi can actually do things a lot more securely, but I started work on the Arduino. I could not get the countdown working properly on the Pi so I left it on the Arduino. Silver lining is it showcased both boards.
The nice thing about the pi is I can access it and program it directly. The Arduino would have had to access the “cloud” to get updates.