Nov 11, 2026, 9:18 PMAnother thing I did: I managed to enable the TTS engine and hooked up a speaker to the amp that's already on the control board. Now I can trigger it to read what's being displayed.
Well, sort of. You have to set up some things, like tell it which text fields (identified by their coordinates) it should read in which order, with prefixes and suffixes and some more things. It also has an optional periodic pilot tone (a little pop) for vision-impaired people.
Nov 11, 2026, 9:19 PMAnd since its web interface exposes a "free text" form to have it say anything (with several seconds of lag since the web server is painfully slow), I set that up as a notification target in Home Assistant. Now the display can speak out things like "Washing machine finished" or "You got mail" :D
Nov 11, 2026, 9:55 PMoh yeah also i have not found a brightness sensor in that display to this day. i have no idea what these engineers built there
@cato das ist sooo cool!
@cato inb4 they use one of the LEDs to read brightness
Nov 12, 2026, 8:10 AM@mart_w oh god
@cato Might it be centrally controlled per station? They probably already have some kind of sensor to turn the platform lights on and off, and maybe they don't want the information displays next to each other at different brightnesses
Nov 12, 2026, 1:31 PM@mart_w Unlikely, I haven't found any brightness control in the protocol docs or while having a look at the decompiled protocol handler
@cato Doesn't have to be in software. The display did change its brightness when you pulled the mystery pin to ground, didn't it?
@cato Nevermind, that was on the bare LED panel, wasn't it
Nov 12, 2026, 1:56 PM@mart_w yep, totally different thing :D