Re: Electronic Highway Signs

Article: 7634 of alt.hackers
From: mikelea@access3.digex.net (Michael Lea)
Newsgroups: alt.hackers
Subject: Re: Electronic Highway Signs
Followup-To: alt.hackers
Date: 9 Apr 1995 15:10:36 -0400
Organization: Express Access Online Communications, Greenbelt, MD USA
Lines: 37
Sender: mikelea@access.digex.net
Approved: me@my.own.bad.site
Message-ID: 3m9bfc$7n2@access3.digex.net
NNTP-Posting-Host: access3.digex.net
Summary: it's almost summary here!
Status: RO

In article <3m2i6g$c6b@anaxagoras.io.com>, marlowe <marlowe@io.com>
wrote:
>The highway near my house in Houston has just installed those electronic
>highway signs that show up all over the country. To be precise, these are
>permanent, tall, and have bulbs as pixels.
>
>I drove past one the day after they were put up, and I could have sworn
>it printed "Hi.   -- Sign." Shades of _LA Story_. I have
decided though
>that it was printing "Highway Sign Test", but I misread it.
>
>Still it has got me wondering, is there anyway to hack one of these? How
>are they programmed. Others in town have highway conditions on them.
>How to the official types communicate with the sign? Radio? Phone? Direct
>connect?

On a related note, there is extensive road construction going on near
where I live.  They have a couple of those signs that have bright purple
back-lighting and green letters, they are used to notify drivers of road
closings.  One day I drove past one and it had "TED WAS HERE"
displayed.
I laughed and laughed...

ObHack:  er, um...  Sorry, I can't think of anything I've hacked up
recently, but a woman I work with recently showed me one of her hacks. We
work for a school and they wanted to hook the bells in the building with
the library and gym in it to the bells in the main classroom building.
It's a good distance between the two, and there are no direct wires
between the two.  So my friend ran 4 wires off of the original bell
system, patched them into the phone system, jumped through 3 punchdown
blocks in three different building and ended up in the library.  She
spliced the four wires there  back into one and ran the bells over there
off of it.
	--mikelea


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All of life is		     //
		  aMAZE.  //
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