Modding Noritake GU126x32F-K612A4 graphic VFD

Re: Few Questions - Available from Itron (UK) Ltd

Hello nzjrs,
Yes Itron (UK) Ltd, is pleased to help you and accept your purchase order. To save space and time here, please email me direct at p.dakin@noritake-itron.com and I'll send you a fully detailed reply with costs and availability.
We ship anywhere in the world, and you'll be disappointed to know you'll not be the first owner of our displays in NZ!
The kit is complete as reviewed here, ie display, cable and filter.

Looking forward to receiving your email.

Regards,

Phil Dakin
Itron (UK) Ltd

 

Re: Few Questions

No LCDC can only control one (controlling them in very simple but the program would need to remember a byte of imformation with the current GPO states in it and LCDC can't do this), but you should be able to use as many key input pins as you like - I never really played with them (only to test) and I don't have this display anymore...

As for an equaliser, yes in LCDC it's a custom character problem (because LCDC only thinks in character terms) and the only solution would be better software for this display... something which actually tried to draw an equaliser graphically.

Cheers,

Rob.

p.s. welcome to the boards!

 

Re: Re: Re: LCDC V1.3 Support For .DEF file.

Still not fixed.. :/

Current thread over @ PlanetDps: http://forums.planetdps.com/index.php?act=ST&f=14&t=933&st=0

 

Well works fine (without a display here), I take it you downloaded the new def file in the first post? Try editing it, at the top of the file there's a line that says 'Version=xxx' change xxx to 1.3 and see what happens.

Rob.

 

Still the same.

Personally, i don't care.. i just downgrade to 1.02.22 and it all works fine, but for the dev. of LCDC, i tried to explain a memory leak in the 1.03.23 release. (Forum link above)

 

Lock EEPROM

I erased my EEPROM becauce i didn't lock it, and i got it back from Itron today... A huge applause to Itron for the excellent support!

I don't want to "kill" it agin, so i'll ask here:
Do i need to lock the EEPROM everytime i start the display (restart the program) with "1BH + 4CH" ?

// PUT440

 

You only need to lock it once, but I think my LCDC script locks it every time it starts anyway.

TBH I forget though, been 6 months since I wrote it

Rob.

p.s. I did make a 'LockEEPROM' function though, so you could add an 'On Screen' - 'process command' - 'LockEEPROM' event in the screen builder if you really want to be careful

 

Thanks Cheese!

I'm not using LCDC so i had to know... writing my own app...

 

Hope you're going to share it with everyone

Rob.

 

of course... if i ever finish it...

 

GPO

Is it possible to use the GPO simultaneously on this display through LCDC.

My plan would be to use three of them as inputs and have eight buttons connected to them through a binary encoder. The remaining 5 pins I would use as outputs, through a binary decoder giving 32 outputs. Roughly 10 of these I'd then wire up to 240V 12A relays (through transistors if necessary??) to control various mains appliances, e.g. lights.

Does anyone who has the display have any idea if this owuld be possible using LCDC?

Cheers for any advice

Rich

 

Re: GPO

You can do it, but not in LCDC

Rob.

 

Have you ever come across Girder? I am a big fan of it and I use it for controlling a whole bunch of stuff. Do you know if I would be able it interface it with the GPO's (possibly through some other software if neccessary - if so what would be needed)

Thanks your your last reply

Rich

 

Talking to the display and controlling the GPO's is very very easy, it's literally just sending a couple of bytes to the serial port to tell the display to change the state of the I/O pins... the trouble is that you set them all at once with a single byte, e.g. say send 01000000 to turn GPO 2 on, but then if you want to turn GPO 3 on as well you need to send 01100000, i.e. any program you're using to control the GPO's need to remember the state of the GPO's (if you just sent 00100000 you'd turn GPO 2 off when you turned 3 on)... LCDC isn't capable of this memory, and I doubt anyone will have written a girder plugin for this display.

It's a very easy thing to do, it's just that it's different to the way other displays with outputs do it, so no one has written support for it.

There's still talk of a few people writting software to specifically support this display, so the problem may go away then...

Rob.

 

Well thats good news. There is no way of toggling indervidual pins then (I remember a while back I was pprogramming some little microcontroller for a project and some of its outputs could be lougled indervisually)

Since you (Cheese) are clearly the LCD/VFD master do you know of any other displays out there that I should look at that come even close to the Noritake VFD?

Is it possible to use some of the GPO's as inputs 2^3 = 8 inputs + 2^5 = 32 outputs is my plan.

Thanks very much

Rich

 

No there's no display that comes close and yep you should be able to use the inputs... though i haven't tried it (and the code they return depends on the gpo states, so for example gpo 8 is wired as an input, if it's closed and all the other GPO's are open you'll read 00000001 when you ask the display for it's IO state, but if gpo 1 is on you'll read 10000001... so what you really need is a program which treats the bits of that byte spearately).

Of course you can toggle any GPO's any time you like in a fixed prearranged way (you can just send the right bytes to set the IO's to anything you want any time), but you can't have them independently controlled by events in LCDC.

Rob.

 

Will I be able to use LCDC to display graphics on the display and use a seperate program to control the GPO's or will that cause problems?

Cheers

 

You couldn't do it easily... because windows won't like you trying to write to the same com port with two programs. You could make lcdc write to a fake com port and your gpo program also and then combine the two and write it to the proper com port, depends how good your programming is I guess

Rob.

 

Thats a good idea.

I don't have a clue about programming, so I just persuade a friend of mine that he wants the program too and get him to write it for me. He doesn't have an LCD/VFD though so it might proove a little tricky this time ;-)

 

Display problems

I've had my display sitting in a box for months waiting for some time to hook it up. I finally did and LCDC would lock up after showing 2-4 screens. I tried the solder trick (leads 4 + 8), and now I don't get anything on the display. What am I doing wrong?

Also, what do you mean by "power on the display"? In LCDC?