lcd

339 Articles

Cheap USB LCD

September 13, 2008 by 13 Comments

Part of the pre-Vista hype was the idea of auxiliary displays. Laptop and desktop displays would provide additional information from your computer. The Vista SideShow feature hasn’t really caught on and the surplus hardware has started to drop in price. Take this PicoLCD for example: It’s a 4×20 character LCD with an IR receiver, multiple buttons, and a USB connection. The best part is: it has Linux drivers and an open source SDK. We know  a lot of you like wiring up HD44780 based screens, but it’s hard to pass up a $50 prepackaged solution with such nice extras.

[via Engadget]

LCD PIC Graphics Demo

September 5, 2008 by 2 Comments

[conville] has been pushing standard HD44780 character displays to the limit. Embedded above is an example spectrum analyzer and text scrolling demo. Below you’ll find a scope demo. Both of these are created using a PIC 16F688 that dynamically rewrites a custom character set to create the animation. You can find the source code on mikrocontroller.net. Continue reading “LCD PIC Graphics Demo” →

3-digit Frequency Meter

June 19, 2008 by 5 Comments


Flow sensors are useful tools for collecting data on the rate of liquid usage, but they need a device to display the data they collect. This three digit frequency meter was designed by [Turbokeu] to do just that, converting a Swissflow SF800 flow sensor’s square wave signal (similar to fan RPM signals) into an numerical expression of liters per minute on a 3 digit LCD. Fan RPM is

[Turbokeu] provides detailed schematics of different configurations for the frequency meter as well as schematics of the layouts of the two PCBs that are used. Even if you don’t have an immediate use for a frequency meter, his clean and readable schematics are worth a look in their own right. The display is installed on front of a tower case along side a CPU speed display.

[via YourITronics]

Nokia Color LCD Flickr Frame

June 16, 2008 by 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]

3 Wire LCD Display

June 13, 2008 by 5 Comments


Normally driving an LCD requires seven connections to pins on the display, but by using a shift register, [Phillip Warner] at Arduino Playground was able to drive an LCD using only 3 wires. The method is cheaper than a serial LCD, but you’ll mainly save yourself a lot of effort and time by using it.

[Warner] used a HEF4094 chip to group the lines together and a variable resistor to control the contrast. A zip file with the requisite code to make this work can be found in the post.

[via YourITronics]

Drawing Images On A Character Display

June 12, 2008 by 7 Comments


[Dean Hall] doesn’t seem to know his Simpsons characters very well, but that didn’t stop him from coming up with this method for displaying a bitmap on an LCD character display with a Hitachi HD44780 chip.

[Hall] used an LCD with two 16 character rows and 8×5 pixels in each character. He displayed the image over 2×3 characters, which gave him 17×18 pixels (including the spaces between the characters) to work with. The first step after acquiring an image is to rasterize the image by hand onto graph paper. This won’t be scanned, it’s just a diagram to determine which pixels to light up.

Once the 6 characters were determined, [Hall] used this handy web-based tool to convert his graphed diagram to bitmap data. The data is loaded onto the microcontroller and the image shows up on the LCD. This is a pretty straightforward project, just be sure you properly identify your monkeys.

[via YourITronics]