Morse Code on an LED

Morse code is an old binary encoding that transmits messages letter-by-letter through sound or a flashing light.

In this project we’re going to write a script that will blink the Omega’s LED in morse code based on the user’s input using the Omega’s command-line interface.

omega led

Overview

Skill Level: Beginner

Time Required: 15 minutes

Ingredients

Step-by-Step

This project will take advantage of a morse LED utility that comes pre-loaded on the Omega. We’ll test out how it works, then write a script to translate text live as we enter it!

1. Prepare the ingredients

You’ll have to have an Omega2 ready to go, complete the First Time Setup Guide to connect your Omega to WiFi and update to the latest firmware.

This project requires the use of the Omega’s command-line, so we’ll have to either SSH into the Omega’s command-line, or connect serially.

To learn more on how to connect to the Omega’s command-line you can read our comprehensive guide to connecting to the Omega.

2. Controlling the LED with the ‘morse’ command

The Omega comes ready with a kernel module that can translate text to Morse code and blink an LED, but you’ll need to tell the kernel which LED you want to blink. The kernel exposes a lot of hardware status and configuration options through a virtual filesystem under /sys.

The files under /sys aren’t actually files, but they look and act like files to make it very easy to access them from the command line and in scripts or programs.

To tell the kernel that we are going to use the Morse code module, set the LED trigger condition for the Omega system LED to morse by using the echo command to write the setting into the virtual file:

If you’re using an Omega2+, the LED will be named omega2p:amber:system

So the command will look like this instead:

You can verify that it worked by using cat to look at the virtual file:

The square brackets indicate that the morse trigger is currently selected. The text in that file shows the other available options that this particular bit of the kernel can be set to.

Anyway, now we have everything set up!

Once the morse option is selected, the kernel creates a new virtual file for that called message. We will echo the text we want to it:

Now watch your LED!

The message will keep looping forever or until you change it. To stop it, you can either clear the message entirely:

or change the LED trigger to something else:

Adjusting the Delay

If it’s too fast or too slow, you can change the speed with the delay file:

To slow it down a bit, we echo a bigger number:

3. Using a Shell Script instead of ‘echo’

Create a file called morse.sh in the root directory using the following command:

You’ll open an empty file. To start typing you can enter a.

Copy the code below into the terminal.

This block diagram shows the steps the _MorseMain function will perform:

code block diagram

Now to save the file you’ll have to enter the Command Mode by hitting the ESC button on your keyboard.

The Command Mode of vi allows you to enter keys to perform commands such as saving and exiting, exiting without saving, or deleting lines.

Type :wq and hit enter to save and exit your file.

save :wq

You are now ready to convert text to morse code!

4. Run it!

To run your Script enter the following command to run your script:

Enter a message that you would like to blink in morse code:

omega led

Once you’re done, you can set the blinking back to default-on with the following command:

Remember, on an Omega2+, the LED will be named omega2p:amber:system as opposed to omega2:amber:system so you will have to pipe the above command to /sys/class/leds/omega2p\:amber\:system/trigger