184: Sunday 10th April 2011

I have had some dialogue with Tim Catellier recently and he has received a connector for me and posted it on as the company wanted $130 to ship it to UK for a $10 part. With this connector I can start the development of my graphic display. I have now had my local supplier send me the wrong connector 3 times and I have asked for a refund. This is my back-up plan and right now I am just waiting for the connector to arrive. It is a 30 way ribbon connector breakout board. This will enable me to access the very fine connections from the ribbon cable to the graphic display. It is a simple circuit board with connection spaced apart so they are easy to solder onto. I shall then connect another bigger ribbon cable to this and then to my prototype board. I can then connect up 9 or 10 switches to manually sequence through the graphic locations on the screen and program them one-at-a-time to generate the static display, then I can start coding up a PIC chip to do the same. Replacing the switches with a PIC chip shall make it possible to run the display and generate the graphics, then onto the measuring circuits. There is a load of mini projects involved in getting this display working, so I hope it will make interesting reading.