Arduino-Powered Info Display For Your Windows Computer

A small 16x2 LCD display housed in a green and yellow hobby box.

If you’ve been pining for a retro-chic 16×2 LCD display to enhance your Windows computing experience, then [mircemk] has got you covered with their neat Windows-based LCD Info Panel.

Your everyday garden variety Arduino is the hero here, sitting between the computer’s USB port and the display to make the magic happen. Using the ‘LCD Smartie‘ software, the display can serve up some of your typical PC stats such as CPU and network utilization, storage capacity etc. It can also display information from BBC World News, email clients, various computer games and a world of other sources using plugins.

It’s clear that the intention here was to include the display inside your typical PC drive bay, but as you can see in the video below, this display can just about fit anywhere. It’s not uncommon to see similar displays on expensive ‘gamer’ peripherals, so this might be an inexpensive way for someone to bring that same LED-lit charm to their next PC build. You probably have these parts sitting in your desk drawer right now.

If you want to get started building your own, there’s more info over on the Hackaday.io page. And if PC notifications aren’t your jam, it’s worth remembering that these 16×2 displays are good for just about anything, like playing Space Invaders.

23 thoughts on “Arduino-Powered Info Display For Your Windows Computer

  1. Not that there’s anything wrong with depending on decade-old software as the source for this, but now that you’ve piqued interest: Are there more modern tools to aggregate system and other information to feed to a small display like this?

    Kind of like MagicMirror-Lite?

    1. That is the right question. I’ve been looking over the years every now and then, but besides some product-specific end-user tools … it’s still all about LCDhype and LCDsmartie.

      So DIY it is

    2. There certainly are, but they’re not all open source, nor are they free.

      Aida64 (commercial software) will report on all sorts of system status info that can be sent to a color LCD in real time, and here’s a forum thread with pictures of sensor panels: https://forums.aida64.com/topic/667-share-your-sensorpanel/page/17/

      HWiNFO64 will do it, too. Free, but still not open source.

      There are probably other tools but these are the only ones I know of.

        1. I’d never heard of LCD Smartie before today but I followed your link and am rather shocked that they’ve been on Sourceforge, claiming to be open source, since 2004, and haven’t released source. Crazy.

          At any rate it seems someone forked the project a long time ago and it’s been updated as recently as last year: https://github.com/stokie-ant/lcdsmartie-laz

          It’s written in Delphi, which was the late, lamented Borland’s extension of Turbo Pascal–or rather, it was originally, but the fork has been since ported to something called Lazarus, which “is a Delphi compatible cross-platform IDE for Rapid Application Development.”

      1. Hi there! There used to be PortTalk for direct i/o. It worked on Windows XP last time I checked. Another project, Port.dll, worked, as well.

        https://brain.cin.ucsf.edu/~idl/software/PortTalk/PortTalk%20-%20A%20Windows%20NT%202000%20I%20O%20Port%20Device%20Driver.htm
        http://b-kainka.de/schnfaq.htm

        Unfortunately, this was before signed drivers were a must.
        Not sure if Windows 10 still is compatible.
        Windows Visa/7 could still use XP drivers to some degree.

        If only there was an official API for LPT port, as there is for USB and COM. *sigh*

    1. And “we” did it in DOS 4.0. Kids these days. Hmmph.

      The parallel port was darned useful: I ran a chord keyboard and and LCD off it. On a 1991 Panasonic CF-270 laptop, running DOS. The BIOS calls to use it were pretty slow, but bitbanging was pretty quick. The days when you could actually manipulate the hardware directly without going through some godforsaken driver abstraction layer… (shakes fist at cloud)

      1. “And “we” did it in DOS 4.0. Kids these days. Hmmph.”

        Weren’t that the “see how I can blink the LEDs from GW-BASIC” days? 😉

        “The parallel port was darned useful: I ran a chord keyboard and and LCD off it. On a 1991 Panasonic CF-270 laptop, running DOS. The BIOS calls to use it were pretty slow, but bitbanging was pretty quick. The days when you could actually manipulate the hardware directly without going through some godforsaken driver abstraction layer… (shakes fist at cloud) ”

        I feel the same. The LPT port was a bit like a miniature USER port from the home computer era.
        It allowed so many useful things, especially with the enhanced forms ECP/EPP. Even DMA was possible at some point.

        Thank you for your comment, sir. 🙂👍
        Having a similar point-of-view, I sometimes feel really lonely with it.
        It’s reassuring that there are still a few more similar minded people around, like you are.

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