News ticker

News ticker

Have your own news ticker showing the news of your favorite news source.

The display is a vacuum fluorescent display (VFD) which looks really good and is easy to read, even in daylight. The microcontroller is an ESP32 C3 which is cheap but ideal for this project.

The ESP32 C3 board will be soldered directly to the display, making the device small and not bulky.

Hardware

Solder the ESP32 C3 board onto the VFD display. The GND pin of the display should align with the GND pin (pin 15) of the board. Then solder a tiny wire between pin A2 (pin 2) and MOSI (pin 6). Do it exactly as in the photo.

Schema

Python

The code for this project is written in Python, so you first have to install Python on the ESP32 C3. First connect the board to your computer with a USB-C cable.

Python installation instructions for the ESP32-C3

News ticker code

When Python is installed, you can install the news ticker software. Go to the micropython-vfd-newsticker GitHub repository, click the green Code button and download the zip file.

Unzip the code and edit the file config.py.

# Change the values below
RSS_FEED_URL = "https://www.cbsnews.com/latest/rss/world"
SKIP_WORDS = ["CBS Weekend News", "CBS Evening News"]
WIFI_SSID = "<your-wifi-access-point-name>"
WIFI_PASSWD = "<your-wifi-password>"

Replace <your-wifi-access-point-name> with the name of your WiFi access point and replace <your-wifi-password> with your WiFi password.

Then use Thonny to upload all Python files (files with a.py extension). Instead of Thonny, you can use another tool you prefer.

Make sure to select ESP32 C3 because the C3 is not compatible with the original ESP32.

In Thonny, Press F5 to run the script. You shoud see Connecting, Getting feed and Parsing texts on the display. After a few seconds, the news should scroll by.

If something went wrong, you should see an error message in Thonny.

When everything works fine, you can disconnect the display from the computer and connect it to any USB-C cable with power (and with good WiFi).

RSS

The default new source is the RSS feed from CBS News, which works fine.

In the config.py file, you can change the RSS feed to another feed from a news source you want to use.

You can even add words that should be skipped if they occur in a news item.

The feed will be refreshed every half hour.

Note: Some RSS feeds don't work well. They can be too big, causing memory problems or they contain the XML <![CDATA[ section that the current XML parser can't handle.