I made a quick&dirty hack to connect to my entertainment center management daemon. It will let you send a message which will scroll across the front of my cable box. It'll also display the first 16 characters on my TV screen (if the TV is on).

Click here to send a message

It's actually not really a cable box anymore. I removed the face plate from the cable box and wired up the LED display to a ICM7218A which is plugged into the parallel port of my Linux computer. No other electronics than that! Some point down the road I plan to order another LED display and put the two side-by-side in the floppy bay in the PC in my entertainment center. But for now the cable box works.

Since the display is only 7 segments per character, some of the characters are rather funky. I wanted to make all the characters unique so they can be identified, but so far I haven't quite gotten used to them. But for the most part it is quite readable.