LCDPresentation View Online

Build an LCD Display for your Computer

(page under construction)

A recent project for our [K-LUG] Linux User group was to create ourselves LCD Displays for computers. We created kits containing all necessary parts for < $20. Some used their LCD Display to show the health of their headless servers, some to show off title and artist information from an MP3 player, and others still to simply have fun with animation. Here is a picture of one of the finished products

http://www.pcig.info/uploads/Main/LCDTuxsm.jpg

Intro to the LCD Kit Project

Welcome to the first K-LUG project involving the attaching of interesting hardware to a computer. We created this project because one member had several monitorless servers he wanted to view performance stats on. We also picked this project so we would have some interesting code to write, and we figured it would be cheap, easy and fun! Ideally our attached display would connect via USB, however, we chose a parallel port connected display because no one seems to use the parallel port anymore, and by using a parallel port the kit was easier to code and cheaper to buy.

When you first look at attaching an LCD display to the parallel port, it looks simple – a bunch of connections, a potentiometer, and maybe a resistor for the back light. In fact, it can be messy and discouraging. This kit is designed to make the interface simple. It was designed by Dennis DeLorme and [Kevin Neff] – if you have questions they should be able to help.

When attaching an LCD display, there are several options for the control functions. Rather than invent our own, we used an existing definition originally used by a Winamp add-on. The connections are as follows.... will convert more later...

Multiplication table

Parallel Port	Port Function	LCD	LCD Function
18-25	GND	1	GND
		2	+5V
2	2	4	6
3	3	6	9
4	4	8	12
5	5	10	15

Parallel Port Port function LCD LCD Function 18-25 GND 1 GND -- 2 +5V -- 3 contrast 16 initialize 4 RS 14 -linefeed 5 R/-W 1 -strobe 6 E 2 Data 0 7 DB 0 3 Data 1 8 DB 1 4 Data 2 9 DB 2 5 Data 3 10 DB 3 6 Data 4 11 DB 4 7 Data 5 12 DB 5 8 Data 6 13 DB 6 9 Data 7 14 DB 7 -- (15) (back light +) -- (16) (back light -)