Digital Billboard

Stage 1

The School of Computer and Security Science wants to develop a digital billboard for ECU Open Days. Your job is to write a Java program to drive the billboard display. The real display will be built using a grid made up of LEDs, but we will simulate the hardware, using a graphical display with a grid of small squares that can be either black or white, as in the image below. Here nearly all the squares are black, and just a few have been turned white, making up the letters of the word “spare”. See image.

In the picture below, the display has been blown up, grid lines added, and white and black switched around, so that you can see how the letters are made up (the grid cells are all supposed to be the same size). See image.

Stage 2

This is the second stage of the Workshop Assessment Task. For details of the task, dues dates, and assessment value, see WorkshopAssessmentTask.pdf on BlackBoard, under Assessments.

Requirements for Stage 2: In Stage 1, you wrote a Java program that uses the DigitalBillboardFrame class to create a display that looks like this: (see image on stage 1)

For Stage 2, you are to write a similar program that can display other words made out of these letters. Your program should

• Ask the user to enter a 5 letter word made up of the letters ‘s’, ‘p’, ‘a’, ‘r’ and ‘e’ – examples: pares, reaps, spear.
• Displays the word entered by the user, on the digital billboard, in about the middle of the billboard (so not in the top left like in Stage 1).
• Your program does not have to check that the user enters a valid word, but it should leave an empty space if the word contains any letter other than these 5, and should still write the rest of the letters.
• The program should then go back to step 1 and ask the user for another word.
• The program will terminate when the user closes the digital billboard window.

Stage 3

This is the third stage of the Workshop Assessment Task. For details of the task, dues dates, and assessment value, see WorkshopAssessmentTask.pdf on BlackBoard, under Assessments.

Requirements for Stage 3: In Stage 2, you wrote a program that displays messages entered by the user using a digital billboard display. The requirements for Stage 3 are identical, except that your program must implement and use the following methods: See image.

The method writeText should draw the message text on the digital billboard, starting with the top-left corner of the first letter x cells from the left and y cells from the top. This method should call the method writeLetter to draw each letter, c, of the message in the correct location. Finally, writeLetter should use a switch statement to decide which of the methods write_s, write_p, write_a, write_r or write_e to call. Obviously, write_s should be used to draw the letter ‘s’ etc.

Stage 4

This is the fourth stage of the Workshop Assessment Task. For details of the task, dues dates, and assessment value, see WorkshopAssessmentTask.pdf on BlackBoard, under Assessments.

The requirements for Stage 4 are identical to those for Stage 3, except that your program must make use of arrays to replace all the methods for drawing a particular with one method.

The methods See image.

are all to be replaced by a new method See image.

This method is called no matter which letter is to be drawn, but a different pixels array is passed as the last parameter, depending on which letter it is.

Stage 5

This is the fifth stage of the Workshop Assessment Task. For details of the task, dues dates, and assessment value, see WorkshopAssessmentTask.pdf on BlackBoard, under Assessments.

Requirements for Stage 5: The requirements for Stage 5 are identical to those for Stage 4, except that your program must now handle more letters and characters, and the array data for drawing them is to be read from a text file.

Stage 6

This is the fifth stage of the Workshop Assessment Task. For details of the task, dues dates, and assessment value, see WorkshopAssessmentTask.pdf on BlackBoard, under Assessments.

Requirements for Stage 6: The requirements for Stage 6 include those for Stage 5, except that

• your program must now include and make use of an additional class; and
• the program must now do the following:
  • Asks the user to enter a message to be displayed;
  • Displays the message on the billboard for 2 seconds, and then;
  • Scrolls the message left to right across the display until it disappears off the right hand side, and then;
  • Scrolls the message left to right, starting from the left of the display, back to where the message started, and then;
  • Flashes the message on and off 5 times (one second on then one second off), and then;
  • Repeats steps 2 to 5 until the user terminates the program.