when I saw this on Dan O'Connor's channel I knew
I had to have it even though I have no practical purpose for it
it's the programmable nameplate with time date and temperature from Brookstone you may remember the
stores they used to have in shopping malls those all closed a couple years ago but they still have
some stores left in airports and of course they have their web site where they sell electronic
knickknacks and what they call lifestyle items and this would fall under that category
they say it's a contemporary desk information center the front panel could be programmed
to display up to three different 16 character messages so for example you can put your name
your title and your current status as your personal message and it would cycle between
those three and on the back which is what you look at it has the date time and temperature
and it runs on four AAA batteries this is not a current product it's from 1999
and here it is they also had a fancier model with a built-in pen and business card holder
which is the version that Dan O'Connor showed in his video this is the simpler
version that is simply a display so there's the 16 character dot matrix liquid crystal display
and on the back you get those displays for the date time and temperature
and on the bottom is the controls and the battery compartment for the four AAA batteries
okay the batteries are installed and according to the instructions you get 60 seconds to replace the
batteries before the memory goes blank so it's no surprise that we're not seeing anything programmed
into the display but on the reverse side we can see the date time and temperature oh it's showing
Celsius we need to change that there that's better and these controls are rather cryptic
so I'll need to look at the instructions to figure out how to program this thing
in case you're interested it can also do 24-hour time and according to the instructions it always
includes February 29th so on non-leap years you'll need to manually set it to March 1st
it took a while but I finally got the date and time programmed and I don't know if I can
show this on camera but I discovered that all three of these displays are actually the same
thing they all have the C and F symbols for the temperature and the AM and PM symbols for the time
so that's kind of interesting instead of having
three separate displays they just reuse the same one for all three
now comes programming the message says to hold down the S button for four seconds
okay then we get our flashing cursor press the C button to cycle through the letters
yep and then you can use the L button to change it from uppercase to lowercase
[Music]
okay finally there's our display
the main pain of programming it is that there's no reverse so if you
overshoot by one letter you have to go all the way around the character
set including the numbers and punctuation marks to get back to the letter you wanted
so it took quite a few mistakes to get this all programmed in
but there it is repeating the message with the person's name
their job title or company they work for and their slogan so you can have three messages of
up to 16 characters each of letters numbers and punctuation marks upper and lower case
the one nice thing is that after you enter uppercase letter it automatically switches
to lowercase for the next letter so that makes it a little bit easier to type in
that still was quite painful because these buttons are not the most responsive one
time it was an unintended mistake because the button got stuck in and I couldn't let it go in
time for it to to avoid overshooting so that was an unintentional mistake
and of course this is non-backlit so you have to be at just the right angle to get
a good view of it otherwise it's going to be too dim or it's going to be too washed
out but I still like the retro appearance of this dot matrix liquid crystal display
just like computer and calculator displays from the 1980s
I mean a certain angle you can even see the dot matrix of each character cell
but certainly it was quite a bit of effort to program that in and it says in order to
display only one of the messages instead of automatically cycling between them
you press and hold the E key for four seconds
and then press the S key until the desired message is displayed so I'll choose that one
and that's it you just let it sit there on that one message and then to return to
the cycling of the three different messages you hold the E key for another four seconds
until it flashes and now it's going to start cycling again
and one drawback of this is that it does not have multiple memories it can only store the
three messages that you program into it so if you want this to display something
temporary like out to lunch or on vacation or something like that you would need to
manually program it in and then it would overwrite whatever you had in
there so this would only be practical for a message that you want to display permanently
if your name is longer than 16 characters you'll need to split it up onto multiple
lines but at least it's nice enough to automatically center each line of text
so that's the Brookstone programmable nameplate from 1999 it does have some
limitations and it's rather tedious to program but I like it and I think it will look nice on
your desk at work or wherever you want to have a three-line message and of course it doesn't
necessarily have to have your name and title on it you can make it say anything you want