If you’ve been following for a while, you’ll know that I’ve always found six word stories fascinating. I like to see it as “Six words are a thousand pictures” which is a play on the phrase “A picture is a thousand words”. They leave so much to the imagination of the reader. This is very much what I was exploring in the early days of this blog when it was more focused on creative writing.

As I was having a look at some of my older posts I came across the r/sixwordstories subreddit. That got me thinking, what if I could bring more attention to all the new six word stories?

And then I looked to the right of my desk and noticed an old project sitting untouched.

Giving an LED matrix project a new purpose

About two years ago, I was experimenting with scrolling text on an LED matrix display using MAX7219 module and an ESP8266 Wi-Fi board, based on a project from eTechPath.

I had already housed it in a 3D-printed enclosure, and I could control it through a simple webpage on my home network. All I had to do was type a message, press Send, and watch the words scroll across the LEDs.

It worked perfectly well, but now I’m looking to take it a little further.

What if instead of manually entering each message, it automatically retrieves six word stories and show them one after another?

It sounds simple enough, but as usual, getting there is a different story (pun intended).

A little troubleshooting goes a long way

The first challenge I encountered was simply accessing the display. For some reason, my phone refused to open the webpage, even though it was connected to the same Wi-Fi network. I tried different browser, checked network settings, and even uninstalled my antivirus app, without success.

Strangely enough, everything worked perfectly from my Windows computer.

So without delaying the project any further, I decided to continue from there.

I opened the browser’s developer tools and tested sending a new message to understand how the webpage was communicating with the display. Then, with a little help from PowerShell, I managed to send messages directly without using the web interface.

That was my first breakthrough.

Bringing Reddit stories to life

The next step, I wanted to figure out how to retrieve the stories from r/sixwordstories subreddit.

My initial attempt was to use Reddit’s JSON feed, but this was blocked by its network security system. Fortunately, I discovered that the subreddit’s RSS feed was accessible which helped me to retrieve the latest posts.

I then experimented with a simple PowerShell script to fetch five stories and send them to the LED matrix automatically.

Of course, a few issues are always expected. The first was that the curly apostrophe, appeared as strange characters on the display, but with a small adjustment to the script I fixed that.

The next thing was the timing. Each story would scroll through for 40 seconds. Shorter stories would scroll before the next message was sent.

I timed a few stories with a stopwatch to compare their lengths, and then adjusted the script to calculate a delay based on the number of characters.

Eventually, the transitions started lining up nicely, although there’s still room for improvement.

Six Words, Endless Possibilities.

And just like that (I mean a few hours), I ended up with a small Wi-Fi connected LED display that retrieves new six word stories from Reddit, scrolls through them, and refreshes the feed.

So for now, the script runs from my laptop but in the future I could decide to move it onto a Raspberry Pi so it can operate independently as a tiny storytelling machine powered by people across the globe.

Even though I’ve given this journal a new chapter this year, it doesn’t mean my previous passions have disappeared, they’ve simply taken a new form.

Should I create a little livestream of the display? I’m thinking to show it in action where anyone can submit a new story in the subreddit and then see it scroll through the display.

Would you like to see something like that? Let me know in the comments!

If you read this far, thank you!

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