At last, yestarday night, I could see my machine's stats on a 16x2
LCD display. Has been quite a while that I wished I could have this
working.
Good thing is that the LCD that I bought around 6 months is flooding
Ritchie street now. I forgot how much I paid for it - might be around
150-200 Rs. There is a grey area here - I assumed that the LCD has a
HD44780 controller. That's because I couldn't see any chip on the
exterior ( and I have not yet opened it up ;). I configured lcdproc
for HD44780 and went along with the 'winamp' connection scheme. This
is an 8 bit connection scheme. Earlier I tried with a 4 bit connection,
but it didn't work. Must have goofed up somewhere.
Actually I had it working on Sunday itself. But I got the contrast
adjustment wrong. So even thought the screen was flickering, I couldnt
see any data. Yestarday I realized that the contrast is max when pin
3 is connected to ground. And voila! There was my CPU usage on the
display!
Things pending now is getting the backlight brightness and contrast
tuning right. Now, the backlight is so bright that it almost shadows
the text. The other problem is that I sometimes get garbled data.
This might be due to a high data transfer rate. This parameter is
tunable in lcdproc with the help of a myltiplier. Will have to get
it right.
This Sat I bought another LCD for Rs 350 from Omega electronics. The
HD44780A00 chip is seen at the back of the LCD. Its a Solomon make.
But the problem with this one is that it doesn't have points to take
wires out. There is a delicate connector and I have not been able to
find a suitable ribbon for it.
I wish to showcase this in MIT LDD.
saha
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