Hi,
I am trying to track down any information on how electromechanical bus route signs work. To start off I am not sure of how they are refered to exactly, but what I am thinking of are the route name displays found at the front of city buses, that are yellow when 'active' and 'black' when flipped. If you have anything that could help me with this I would appreciate it.
Thanks
Andre
you know those little disc magnets found behind refrigerator ornaments?
it's them with one side painted yellow and an axle along the flat dimension
there's wires rinning past it and when curent flows throug them the magnet moves to match the magnetic field of the current.
probably a massive over-simplification but I think you get the idea.
Bye. Jasen
Example product...
"Each segment contains a permanent magnet which interacts with an electro-magnet. A current pulse activates a reversal of the magnetic field induced in the electromagnet which determines whether the segment is expos ed (set) or retracted (reset)."
Basically they use solenoids.
Hello
I have some of these readout devices, they came from Ferranti in the UK. There are others making this type of display. My units were 7 inch character ht, and operate from plus or minus 12 volts. Momentary pulse of course, but will stay in the last state actuated.
I built my signs into a time of day display with six digits, hours, minutes & seconds. To drive them required some smarts, an 8051 microcontroller did the job. Fed the processor with serial data with the first part of byte as digit position and second part of byte as data. Six words would set it to any time of day dynamically.
cheers kw
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