Weather on Roku Soundbridge I

The Roku Soundbridge is a truly cool toy - even if you only use it for listening to internet radio hooked up to your stereo.

I've got tons of equipment that tells me the time, so I decided to use Juergen Gluch's Tools4Roku script to show the weather forecast when it is not in use.

Problem is, he's got a pretty fancy model that displays pictures, whereas I have the M400 with its simple 2x16 character LCD.

Once I got started butchering his Perl script, I started to see that the M400 really could benefit from a simpler interface than the one offered by the RokuUI Perl module (written by Michael Polymenakos). I stress that there's nothing wrong with RokuUI, it just felt that a few extensions could improve its use for the M400.

Firstly, I had a play with the marquee feature - the script would move on to the next item before a line had been completely displayed, so I had to figure out a good length of time to display the text dependant on the length of the text. After a bit of experimentation, I found that 5 seconds for every 25 characters seemed to work.

  $duration = (int(((length($text))+24)/25))*5;

  $rc = $self->msg(text => "$text",
                   keygrab  => 1,
                   mode => 'marquee',
                   duration => $duration);

However, marquee was too restrictive as it only be uses the top line, allowing access to only 16 of the meagre 32 characters.

A new marquee is needed!


To Be Continued...