Nokia LCD, Nunchuck, And MSP430 Join Forces

February 2, 2011 by Mike Szczys 11 Comments

[JB’s] driving a Nokia 6100 LCD using an MSP430 with input from a Wii Nunchuck. He’s using the G2211 microprocessor that came with the Launchpad, and developing his code with MSP-GCC. As you can see in the video after the break, this works but there’s some room for improvement. That’s being said, he is bumping up against the code memory limit, with just around 500 bytes left to work with. The LCD screen is SPI and currently it’s hogging the pins that are used for the hardware i2c. Since he needs an i2c bus to talk to the nunchuck he had to go with software i2c which explains part of his program memory troubles.

We’re in no way experts on this, but it seems like he could save space (and improve the input responsiveness) by rewriting his LCD drivers in order to remap the pins. Then again, it might just be better to move up to a larger MSP430. If you’ve got some advice, make sure to share it by leaving a comment.

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Touring The Available Nokia LCD Screens

October 14, 2010 by Mike Szczys 23 Comments

[Rossum’s] taking a look at the Nokia LCD screens that are both plentiful and begging to be bent to your will. For quite some time the Nokia 6100 screens have been used in a lot hacks, but he wanted to see what else is out there. He digs into his junk box of cell phones and comes up with a couple to test; the Nokia 6101 and Nokia 2760. The screens use a 3-wire SPI interface, which he sniffs out with a logic analyzer. At power-up the cellphone polls the screen to determine which type of LCD controller is connected. [Rossum] grabs these commands from the logic analyzer and uses it to determine the hardware in use with each screen.

He made himself a nice breakout board which has connectors for several different screens. The firmware he’s using detects when a screen is attached and switches to the applicable protocol for that display. Take a look at the video after the break.

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Nokia Color LCD Flickr Frame

June 16, 2008 by Eliot 2 Comments

Tinkerlog got their hands on a color LCD from SparkFun and set it up to receive images from Flickr. These color LCDs are 128×128 pixel and the include a breakout board with a separate power supply for the backlight. Communication is via a three wire SPI bus plus a reset line. [Alex] used an ATmega48 for control, which is connected to the computer using an RS232 to USB converter. The wiring schematic is here.

For the software side of things, he adapted Sparkfun’s example ATmega8 code for the microcontroller (he couldn’t get the Arduino code to work). Beej’s Python Flickr API was used to grab the images. The Python Imaging Library converted them, and finally, they were sent to the display using pySerial. SparkFun has been offering these displays for quite some time; it’s good to see a quality writeup of one in use.

[via Make Flickr Pool]