The most frustrating part of this project so far was trying to get the initialisation code right. The main obstacle to this was the fact that there are 2 chips that are used in these displays, the HT1632 and the HT1632C and while they're both made by Holtec and perform the same function the initialisation process differs slightly for each. And to compound this the first display I used had a HT1632C while the 4 displays I ended up using had HT1632s.

I wrote the drivers to control the displays directly in C as it would be ideal for this job especially when coulped with the WiringPi libararies. However C would be unsuited for the task of scripting the displays so I call the C driver via bash which also allows for easy debugging. You can see the C driver here: https://github.com/pinski1/MessageBoard/tree/master/Software

By typing "sudo write_disp -s 50 -m 'Hello world!'" the display will scroll "Hello world!" with a 50 millisecond pause between each column of LEDS in a character.