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- A Foreword
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Some Things to Remember - |
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LCDs are rather sensitive little beasties. They are particularly sensitive
to being connected backward to power supplies, being stepped on, and other
assorted seemingly-obvious things. I mention them because, well, I've
either done them or seen them happen. Letting out the magic smoke because
you've plugged the power cable in backwards truly sucks, so I feel
it's worth a mention.
The sections of this page describe how to connect various displays to your
PC. Each display is different; make absolutely certain what every
connection is and what (if anything) goes to it before you begin
the installation process.
Some of the text that follows is based on materials provided to us by the
LCD manufacturers. I have taken the liberty of clarifying certain points;
consider these texts the result of collaborative efforts between the
LCDproc developers and the equipment manufacturers.
Please keep in mind that while these procedures are simple and straightforward,
it is possible to blow things up and cause permanent damage to LCDs and/or
other system components. Just be careful. And don't sue anybody when if
something breaks, because we warned you... and stuff. :)
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- Common Information
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This applies to every display - |
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Each display has two basic needs: power supply, and data supply. Both
serial and parallel displays can be connected to a PC with standard
enabling; the only real trick is making an in-PC installation look good.
Whether you are mounting the display with a manufacturer's mounting kit
or installing it in your system's case yourself, the display needs to be
physically mounted where it will not come in contact with stray power
cables or other sources of unwanted electricity.
[photo here: physical mounting]
Connecting the power supply is usually straightforward, typically
involving a modified PC power cable for 5V or 12V internally mounted
displays, or by building (or buying) an external power brick for displays
that sit outside the box. Please read the instructions in the
appropriate section below for details on specific models. If your display
isn't featured here, but it works in LCDproc, please send us details
about your display and how you connected it to your system.
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- Displays
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Take your pick - |
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CrystalFontz
Matrix Orbital
HD44780
Curses
STV5730
SED1330
SED1520
Cwlinux
Pyramid LCD
BWCT USB converter
Code Mercenaries IOWarrior
CrystalFontz
CrystalFontz displays require 5V power. A standard PC power cable can
be easily modified to power the display. Refer to
this PDF file for a load of details.
Many thanks to Brent Crosby
for this information..
CrystalFontz is now having USB version of CF632/4 LCD and those are supported
by LCDproc starting from version 0.4.4. Wayne Wylupski made the necessary
modification in the driver for this and also created a
Howto
CrystalFontz USB to give you more information.
WARNING!
We nor Matrix Orbital shall be held responsible for anything you manage
to do to your system whilst following these instructions. Installing the
LCD is very simple, but it is also very trivial to violently blow
something up if you don't pay attention during the installation.
So don't sue us -- we warned you, and stuff.
The LCD requires a 5V power supply and a DB9 connection. I'll leave it
up to you to figure out how to get one of your serial ports connected
to the display, but I'll help you out in the power department.
Buy, borrow, or steal a 3.5" floppy drive power cable. You will need
this for powering your display off of your computers power
supply. Below is a diagram of what the floppy drive connector should
look like, there are two ways to do it according to what model of
display you bought. The first is the 5-volt model limited to just +5v
so the power supply from your computer works really great for
this. The second is the wide voltage models which take +6v -
+15v. Again the computer power supply is great for this, but you have
to use the +12v wires because +5v will not work with these
displays. Check out the below diagram for a visual reference.
Once you've gotten this connector assembled, connect it to the display
so that the red wire feeds the clearly marked +5V pin and the black
wire feeds the also clearly marked GND (ground) pin. Turn on
machine. Smile as you see the display tell you what BIOS version it
has. Assuming you also connected the serial cable, you can now run
LCDproc (see the README) on it.
Check out the User Guide
for everything you ever wanted to know, but were too afraid to ask,
about the HD44780.
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- Curses
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What are those Seven Bad Words anyway? - |
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Again, it's really easy to get curses support working. You simply
need the curses (or ncurses) library installed.
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- STV5730 TV Output
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Makes a pretty big screen - |
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This one is not for LCDs; the STV5730 is an on screen display IC
commonly found in TVs and VCRs. It can create a color
NTSC or PAL video signal alone or can overlay the text to another video
signal.
You need this Hardware to make it
work.
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- SED1330
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Maybe too big ? - |
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The SED1330 is found on many medium/large sized B/W graphical LCDs. This
driver was written to drive the Seiko G321D LCD module, but should also be
able to drive some other LCD modules with an SED1330.
See the documentation for connection details.
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- SED1520
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Small and graphic - |
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Displays with the SED1520 controller are supported by this driver. These
are full graphic displays which are usually
122 x 32 Pixels small. The driver emulates a 20 x 4 character display.
Look here for connection diagrams
and more information.
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- Cwlinux
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from a linux embedded company - |
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Hey, does this thing look good or what !
Cwlinux produces this module.
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- Pyramid LCD
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Used in appliance-systems built by Pyramid - |
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- BWCT USB converters
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small and slim converters - |
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Bernd Walter Computer Technology sells converters from USB to
HD44780-type LCD displays.
The converters, which are really tiny and allow the display contrast to be controlled by software,
are sold with LCD displays and without in case you want to use your own display.
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- Code Mercenaries IOWarrior
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LCDs and more on USB - |
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Code Mercenaries build a series of universal USB converter
chips named IOWarrior.
Besides being able to drive HD44780 compatible displays the chips in the IOWarrior family
offer various other functions such as controlling a matrix of up to 8x32 LEDs, an interface
to the I2C bus, a decoder for RC5 infrared signals ...
In order to get you started quickly they also offer starter kits with all necessary parts included
for initial testing.
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