This digital thermometer won’t win any awards for being something innovative and new, but we really like how it looks. The bar graph style display adds something to the project that a normal character display just wouldn’t. You can download source code and schematics on the site.
[via YourITronics]
I don’t know about this one, but my serial display comes with a driver that allows the definition of (iirc) up to eight special characters as bitmaps.
This facilitates the displaying of graphs like this quite a bit.
(We use this on our media server at home where the display shows the current play position of music player daemon, or if nothing is being played, some stats about how many terabytes of disk space there are/free and how that relates to us being better persons.)
The cool thing about having an off-the-shelf driver for the display is, that it’s nicely configurable via serial using a little python script.
@pascal
Yes, the industry-standard HD44780 has CGRAM for eight characters. However, at least a couple of different-sized devices were unable to refresh the image after changing bitmaps. That is, it becomes impossible to represent finer steps (for which eight characters are not enough) or do some animation tricks — a rather trivial job even for a CGA/EGA controller. It seems that CGRAM is considered only at the moment when a new character is sent to DDRAM, and never afterwards.
Bascom AVR rules – so quick and easy to develop while offering a powerful library with the speed of a compiler. Anyone doing avr work should really check it out – they have a free demo that compiles up to 4kb of code.
And yeah, analog displays definately have the advantage of being interpreted more quickly than numeric data.
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Analog/Digital
Nothing like having a quick, easy read that immediately tells you the situation. We learned that in the aircraft industry. Having accurate, precise digital displays actually adds to the pilot workload.
Having a graphical analog display method can actually increase the amount of information as you are looking at overall engine health and can tell immediatly when something goes wonky, or discern an overall trend from all functions that is eliminated when you have to look at each data display, interpret numbers and form some sort of mental map as to what is really happening.