Interactive & useful LCD displays

SpeederA

Hi everyone,

Since this is my first post, I might as well introduce myself before rambling.

Here's the concise list:
I'm a computer systems analyst/independent consultant/business owner from/in nyc.
Developer for many, many years.
These days I usually program for what most people here probably consider the "dark side", lol, and have not touched BSD in a long, long time, but it should not take me long to get back up to speed.
I enjoy long walks on the beach and candl….. :P

Okie, on to the statement/question.

I'm jumping into pfSense head first. It's going into the center of my brand new, many 10's of $k's network.
Basic specs are 2u rackmount chassis, dual EM64T 3ghz single core xeons, 2 gigs ram, 8 full gig network ports (2 onboard, 2 dual intel nics on 133mhz pci-x bus, 1 dual intel nic on second 100mhz pci-x bus), raid card in the pci-e port, hot-swap (Raid 1) 80 gigs hard drives, etc, etc....

Here's the problem...
My case isn't bling enough and ppl will think, "geeze, that's a boring expensive firewall".
lol, no, wait, that's not my problem (well not the most important part of it, ;D).
My problem is that there is no useful "at a glance" network status on the front panel of the system.
Nothing that says, "Hey you!! Yah, the short guy in the corner!! Everything is going to hell in a hand basket and you better damn well fix me right now!!".

To that end, I've ordered one of these http://www.crystalfontz.com/products/633usb/index.html and one of these http://www.crystalfontz.com/products/631/index.html and I plan to install them into my lonely, lackluster firewall chassis.

I'll most likely start working on the plugin for pfSense for this in about three weeks (I've got a crapload to do at the moment…). It will probably end up being done as two modules. A "physical status display" module and a "physical status control" module so that lcds without control buttons will be usable with this package as well. The LCD side will be a generic link to pfSense so that you can just plug in a driver, a couple lines of codes, and the size of the LCD being controlled and you'll be up and running with almost any display out there. The same thing with the control buttons. They'll essentially end up being "soft keys" that you can just tack a command to.

I'll also include a smorgasbord of "visuals" so that you can spend untold countless hours playing with the buttons on the front of your firewall to the amazement of friends and family. Just imagine their surprise when your lcd not only shows network status and bandwidth usage graphs, but failover and wireless connections as well! Yay! (well at least when failover is actually available, argh!)

Okay, now to the question part of my long ass post.

Is anyone out there in pfSense land already working on a such a wonderific solution and, if yes, do you want to combine minds or am I going to end up doing this stag? I've got no problem sharing the fame for what will be the most important addition to pfSense ever, :P, as it saves me time and time is money duncthya know, 8).

I'd appreciate some pointers on what parts of pfSense I should start looking into first regardless of the answer.

Thanks!

Programmer of wonderific things,
Speeder

hoba

Afaik nobody is working on this feature but this would make a really nice package. You might want to have a look at http://lcdproc.org/ as it seems to offer a lot of what you need already.

MrMoo

Unfortunately neither LCDproc or LCD4Linux work well with the CrystalFontz display, both teams are amazingly slow at updating too. Thankfully the forums are more productive at CrystalFontz, check out this thread:

http://www.crystalfontz.com/forum/showthread.php?threadid=3329

That is the only version of any code that is remotely stable and works well. That's my post at the bottom, I updated the code a bit, I have two displays myself. The code needs to be updated to use an event manager in order to handle inputs correctly, the glib toolkit is perfect for this job. Unfortunately my displays are in NY and I am in HK so I'm working on something else instead.

It appears too tedious to fix LCDproc and LCD4Linux as there is nothing inherently wrong in their code :(

SpeederA

Thanks.

I'll take a look at it when I get the chance.

I've got to finish some .NET development work first and then I'm going on a cruise+conference to the carribean next month for a week. Then I also have clients that need analyst work done as well as networking stuff. Plus, I still have office duties to attend to such as the scolding of my employees and the spending of money…. etc, etc, ;o).

It should not take long at all to write up the package once I get started on it though.

But keep posting stuff I should look at!!

Oren

P.S. I got this http://www.crystalfontz.com/products/635/index.html not the 633, was a typo on my part.

alexus

Jusr seen this post here, we are working on LCD /w IO pannel (Buttons)…
At this stage the hardware proto is ready, but still can be modified for final relese. Original Idea was to use I2C port to that wecan use it for wrap. Sure we can add RS232 and USB support for regular PCs that dont have SMBbuses. (Exept if some one wants that you gotta invest adding ports, i dont have buget for this at the moment ~$800)

Also we kinda having problem writing a driver for BSD so we can have comunicate with the thingy via I2C, I know lmsensors have the code but I dont have any good BSD Engeneer that will utilize it (myself is useless on that advanced level) Never the less hardwarevise my man can do anything.

Finally, im not touching this project till i finish my Online / Offline Notifier

PS: We are in NYC too :-P

SpeederA

I'm assuming that you are talking about building the actual LCDs rather than software. I'm planning to create the pfsense package this month. It will be hardware independent. All you will have to do is create a driver for your lcd screen and then an interface that implements the calls required by the package.

alexus

yea we do the hardware, and was thinking to do the software too. But if you gonna do the soft part and if you can add suport for I2C port w/ automatic hardware detection I would be so happy :-)

Also i can lay out alghorithm for user buildable menues (oh well that if you would have buttons on ur lcd.. thats actualy one of the reason why we doing our own hardware)

alexus

did u have any chance to build something?

Cojo

Any progress on this? Would love to connect an lcd to my pfSense box.

alexus

yes im working on LCDs as yo ming see thta in previous posts:-P

KDB9000

Didn't really think about doing the LCD with pfSense but it would help. I am working with another guy making a system to work with something called Trixbox (VoIP system using Linux and Asterisk). Like the other guy we didn't like the LCDproc or LCD4Linux, so we started work on our own. We are still developing it. It uses PHP CGI to control the CF 635. We are developing with and without the scab. Maybe we can add support for pfSense or a module for it. If anyone is interested, please visit http://www.lcdphp.org/lcdphpforum/ and if you want to help let me know. We hope to be releasing a version soon.

BigTy

I have a Matrix Orbital screen for some one if they will complete a package for it.

http://www.matrixorbital.com/product_info.php?pName=lk20424usbwb&cName=lcd-character-lcds