Front display control

[a_carneiro]

Well, I'm not sure if there is anyone left in this forum but, on the off chance, here goes a question 😉

I have installed Debian on my old ReadyNAS Pro 6 (it has a VGA header on the motherboard, it was really easy to do once you just plugged a VGA cable into that).

Currently it has OpenMediaVault running. Beauty, no problem. I upgraded to a E7600 CPU and ordered 8GB of RAM.

The front display just says ReadyNAS and the backup light is lit all the time.

I would prefer the backup light to be off and the front display to show either a static text of my choosing or dynamically (every second or so) update with information like CPU load or space free or IOWait or whatever parameters I choose.

Does anyone have any ideas how I could possibly do that?

Thank you in advance! 😄

[StephenB]

Try the suggestion in post 2 here:

• https://community.netgear.com/t5/ReadyNAS-Storage-Apps-Current/Writing-to-LCD-on-Ultra-6/td-p/890703

[a_carneiro]

Ugh! My Google-Fu is terrible, it seems.

Thank you for that!

I did manage to clear the display but if I try

echo randomwords > /dev/ttyS1

nothing happens. How can I display a customised message?

I know this probably sounds incredibly noobish but this really is all very new to me.

Thank you for your help! 😄

[Sandshark]

Did you try quoting "randomwords"?

[a_carneiro]

I did. Both with double and single quotation marks…

[StephenB]

---

@a_carneiro wrote:

echo randomwords > /dev/ttyS1

Does it make any difference if you use >>  instead of  >

[a_carneiro]

No, doesn't seem to make a difference.

The only thing that I can make happen is the display go blank.

Oh, well. Shame but not the end of the world 🙂

[timekills]

From a shell, try the following:

cat /etc/init.d/lcd
#!/bin/bash
echo "E" > /dev/ttyS1
sleep 0.5
echo "L OMV" > /dev/ttyS1

Note that you do have to include the L in the last line for the text afterward to actually display - and yes, the L is inside the quoted text portion.

You can replace the OMV portion with whatever text will fit.