Vestaboard Integration.md

Vestaboard Integration

Protoflap is how the Welcome Room's Vestaboard gets messages from the portal.

Theory

The Vestaboard's Raspberry Pi runs a python script called Protoflap that continuously polls the Spaceport's /stats/ API route.

Members can send messages to the marquee LED sign + Vestaboard from both the portal and Protovac, or to the Vestaboard only from the portal. The messages are handled by sign(...) and vestaboard(...) in views.py.

If you want to write a message programmatically, POST vestaboard=your message to https://api.my.protospace.ca/stats/vestaboard/. See below for examples.

The following special characters are supported:
\w: white block, \r: red block, \o: orange block, \y: yellow block, \g: green block, \b: blue block, \v: violet block, \d: degree symbol

The Protoflap code lives here:
https://github.com/Protospace/protoflap

Setup

Follow instructions in the Protoflap README.

The script is kept alive with Supervisor.

Examples

Here are examples for sending your own custom message to the Vestaboard.

Bash:

$ curl -d 'vestaboard=Hello World' https://api.my.protospace.ca/stats/vestaboard/

Python:

import requests

def send_vestaboard_message(message):
    url = "https://api.my.protospace.ca/stats/vestaboard/"
    data = {'vestaboard': message}
    response = requests.post(url, data=data)
    return response.text

# Usage:
send_vestaboard_message("Hello World")

JavaScript:

function sendVestaboardMessage(message) {
  fetch('https://api.my.protospace.ca/stats/vestaboard/', {
    method: 'POST',
    headers: {
      'Content-Type': 'application/x-www-form-urlencoded'
    },
    body: `vestaboard=${encodeURIComponent(message)}`
  })
  .then(response => response.text())
  .then(data => console.log(data))
  .catch(error => console.error('Error:', error));
}

// Usage:
sendVestaboardMessage('Hello World');