readerboard

An HTTP service that drives a BetaBrite Classic sign, either through a serial cable or through an Ethernet to RS-232 adapter.

Several sources can share the sign at once. Each registers a named slot, and the sign rotates through the registered slots by itself. An alert takes the whole display over until it is released, after which the rotation resumes.

What it does

• Many messages, one sign. Home Assistant can own temperature while a doorbell automation owns doorbell, without either knowing about the other.
• The sign does the rotating. Each message lives in its own sign file and the sign cycles them on its own, so rotation costs no serial traffic at all.
• Alerts. Take the display over, optionally with a deadline, then hand it back.
• It keeps the sign's clock right, at startup, hourly, and whenever the link comes back. That last trigger is the one that matters: a sign returning from a power cut does so at no particular minute.
• It does not redraw the sign for nothing. A write of bytes the sign already holds is suppressed, so a source re-sending an unchanged temperature does not make the display flicker.
• It survives restarts and outages. The registered messages are persisted, and a write that arrives while the sign is unreachable is accepted and delivered when the link returns.
• Errors are errors. A dead serial link is a 503, not an HTTP 200 with the word ERROR in the body.

Requirements

• Python 3.11 or newer.
• A BetaBrite Classic, reachable either at a serial device such as /dev/ttyUSB0 or over the network through an Ethernet to RS-232 adapter at socket://host:port.
• For the installer, a machine running systemd. The service itself runs anywhere Python does; only scripts/install.sh is Linux specific.

Try it without a sign

loop:// is pyserial's loopback, so the service will start and serve its API with nothing attached.

pip install -e ".[dev]"
READERBOARD_SERIAL_URL=loop:// READERBOARD_API_KEY=dev-key \
    READERBOARD_STATE_PATH=./state.json \
    python -m readerboard

Then open http://127.0.0.1:5001/docs.

Installing it properly

sudo scripts/install.sh --serial-url socket://192.168.2.51:4001

This creates a readerboard system user, builds a virtual environment in /opt/readerboard, writes /etc/readerboard/config.toml with a freshly generated API key, and enables the readerboard service. It prints the key once, and it is safe to run again after pulling a new version: your config file and key are left alone.

sudo scripts/uninstall.sh removes the service and the program but keeps your config and your registered messages, so reinstalling puts the sign back as it was. Add --purge to remove those too.

Using it

Every write needs an X-API-Key header. GET /health does not.

Register a message:

curl -X PUT http://localhost:5001/v2/messages/temperature \
     -H 'X-API-Key: YOUR-KEY' -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
     -d '{"message": "<green>18.4<degree> <red><time>", "display_mode": "HOLD"}'

Register a second one and the sign rotates between them:

curl -X PUT http://localhost:5001/v2/messages/doorbell \
     -H 'X-API-Key: YOUR-KEY' -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
     -d '{"message": "<amber>Someone at the door", "ttl_seconds": 300}'

Take the sign over for thirty seconds:

curl -X POST http://localhost:5001/v2/alerts \
     -H 'X-API-Key: YOUR-KEY' -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
     -d '{"message": "<red><flash_on>SMOKE ALARM", "ttl_seconds": 30}'

The full API, including every markup token and display mode, is at /docs.

Writing messages

A message is plain text plus tokens written as <name>: <green>18.4<degree> is a colour change, a number, and a degree symbol. GET /v2/enumerations/markup-tokens lists them all.

Text is encoded against the sign's own character table rather than as UTF-8, so café displays correctly. A character the sign cannot render is rejected with a 400 on /v2, and replaced with ? on the simpler endpoints described below.

A simpler set of endpoints

Alongside /v2 there is a smaller surface: POST /Write/Message, POST /Write/ControlCommand, and the /Enumerations reads.

These follow one convention that /v2 does not. Every response is HTTP 200, with the outcome in the body:

{"result": "OK", "result_message": "Message displayed on sign"}

That suits a client which finds branching on status codes awkward, such as a Home Assistant rest_command or a shell one-liner in a cron job. The single exception is a missing or wrong API key, which is a 401: a caller the service will not talk to is not the same as a request that failed.

POST /Write/Message writes to one reserved slot, named default. It deliberately does not touch the sign's priority file, which by protocol suppresses every other message on the sign. Written to an ordinary slot it looks identical while it is the only message registered, and it shares the sign the moment anything else registers.

Configuration

Settings come from /etc/readerboard/config.toml, overridden by environment variables prefixed READERBOARD_. packaging/config.example.toml documents every one of them.

The sign's address is a full pyserial URL in serial_url: socket://192.168.2.51:4001 for an Ethernet to RS-232 adapter, /dev/ttyUSB0 for a cable plugged straight in, or loop:// to run the service with no sign attached.

Two settings reallocate the sign's memory when changed, and that erases every message on it: slot_count and slot_capacity. The service will do it, and say so loudly in the log, but they are not settings to fiddle with.

Security

An API key is required on every write, compared in constant time, and never logged.

Message content reaches the sign as protocol bytes, so it is worth knowing what a client holding the key can do. The markup renderer emits bytes only for tokens it recognises and for characters in the sign's own table, so arbitrary control sequences cannot be injected through a message. What the holder of a key can do is display anything they like on your wall and set the sign's clock. There is nothing beyond the sign to reach: the service opens one serial link and touches nothing else.

Sensible precautions remain sensible:

• Do not expose the service to the internet.
• Keep /etc/readerboard/config.toml mode 0640. Anyone who can read it can write to the sign.
• Give the key only to clients you trust, and prefer a firewall allow-list on top.
• The service runs as a dedicated system user under a hardened systemd unit, which is worth keeping rather than running it as root for convenience.

Development

pip install -e ".[dev]"
pytest
ruff check .
mypy readerboard

No sign is needed. The tests run against a capturing fake transport and against pyserial's loop:// URL, so the real serial code path is exercised without hardware.

docs/protocol-notes.md records what the Alpha protocol actually says about the memory configuration, the run sequence and the priority file, with the quotations that back each claim. Read it before changing anything in readerboard/protocol/.

scripts/protocol_spike.py settles the few questions the document cannot answer about this particular sign. It is destructive and refuses to run without --confirm-erase.

Licence

MIT. See LICENSE.md.

One caveat, recorded because it is easy to miss. readerboard/protocol/constants.py is vendored from jonathankoren/readerboard, and that repository carries no license file. No license is not the same as a permissive one: it means no copying permission has been granted at all. That module is therefore the one part of this project whose provenance is not cleanly MIT.

In practice it is a table of byte values dictated by the protocol rather than authored expression, and docs/protocol-notes.md now cites the protocol document directly, so the table can be regenerated from the primary source if that ever needs settling properly.

Credits

readerboard/protocol/constants.py came, with thanks, from jonathankoren/readerboard, with some corrections noted in the file.

The protocol itself is documented in the Alpha Sign Communications Protocol, form 9708-8061, published by Adaptive Micro Systems.