Modding Big grayscale touchscreen - ideas?

My Psion Revo died a few weeks ago (something with the built-in batteries). It was totally knackered so I tried replacing the batteries but it's just the same now. However it will power off the charger and work fine with a little fiddling with the batteries.

So I now have a large 16-colour grayscale touchscreen to play with. Obviously it would be hell to interface to a computer so I thought it would be good to just take the guts out of the chassis and write a little program for it. Basically I can write the code to display data on the screen as text or very basic graphics and also take data from the serial port.

This is all good news, but what data could I display on it? Also anyone have any links to little easy code snippets for getting these details and sending them over the computer's serial port?

 

Winamp control?

*n

 

Possibly yeah. The touchscreen thing could be quite cool for something like that, or maybe for selecting different stats to make a graph of

 

Play, pause, stop, next track, last track, volume up, volume down, AVS start/stop, EQ on/off.

And it HAS to look like this:





*n

 

lol nice paint shop jobbie

 

The REALLY depressing thing is that I used Photoshop.

*n

 

<rain on parrade> The revo, like every other psion has a long horizontal screen... </raining>

 

give it to me i broke my screen

 

You turn it 90 degrees, spacker.

*n

 

Spacker, now thats somethign I aint heard in a logn time hehe

 

Please tell me you were TRYING for the errm Gheto look.



I know Matrix Orbital love giving away (mainly VB) code to help you interface with there range of LCD's a few tweaks and you could probably use that.

 

acrim: I assume you mean using the code to send data over the serial port yeah? I'll take a look, but I'm sure there are plenty of tutorials around on the net anyway.

 

hum... I've made a program in C that writes on a monitor... just had to write directly in the video card memory. but I don't know how you can use the serial port...

anyhow, you better make a whole lot of functions because when writting directly in memory, you write pixel by pixel in hexa....at least that's how we did it in C... of course I think you'll do it with a graphic programming language (c++, delphi, vb) else you're suicidal haven't learned c++ yet... but it gives me ideas to play with

gonna be very great !!! keep us updated

 

It's really not as difficult as that. All I need to do is format a few strings and find some code on the Internet to send stuff through the serial port. It should be much easier than writing to the video RAM.