185: Saturday 23rd April 2011

Started work on the graphic display today. First objective was to get the display powered up and basically showing something that I have decided on. I now had the connector board from Tim in USA, cheers buddy. Had a collection of pin strips from when I was making the other displays. In the photo below you can see after I have added one row of pins to the board.
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In this photo you see the second row of pins added. This layout is identical to IDE connectors for a floppy disk drive and I had a couple of spare ribbon cables with connectors, so that was a bonus.

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In this photo you can see the ribbon cable connected.

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In this photo you can see how I handled the other end of the ribbon cable that needed to connect to my prototype board. This shows one of the rows of pins that would connect to the IDE connector on the other end of the cable. As there are two rows then I needed to make two of these and offset the pins to bridge the gap on the prototype board.

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In this photo you can see the two connectors I made between the IDE cable connector and my prototype board. I cut the cable as the next part went to a different connector and it made it easier to handle.

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In the next photo you can see everything connected. The bits on the left of the prototype board were from another project some time ago. The display is connected to the adapter board and I put a double-sided sticky pad on it's back to stick it to the ribbon cable temporarily. This was for support as the display's own ribbon cable is like a tape. I tried just hooking up the 5v supply, and then adding the other components that were shown in the example circuit on the data sheet. I tried manually wiring the circuit data lines to send some simple instructions, but there was nothing on the display. I still need to add capacitors for the LCD driver circuits and I did not have the right values. I had the right capacitors and resistors for the voltage inputs and have added these already. I need to check what I ordered for this project and see if I should have these parts. Other wise I need to go buy them. I want to finish this up before I try anything else. I decided to just send a control instruction to turn all points on initially. That will prove that the display works. I have a usb controlled interface that I can use to set up a simple bus and send data from a PC to progress from there, then I can work out how to get a PIC chip to do the same job of the usb interface. I was impressed with the Velleman website as I bought the board about ten years ago and I have now misplaced the disk that came with it. I went to the website and within minutes I had downloaded a complete suite of example programs in many different computer languages and instructions on how to install the drivers etc. Another couple of minutes and I had the interface up and running. I now need to clear some space on the bench where my PC is and move the prototype board over to it as I don't want to trail a long usb cable across and then have to keep going backwards and forwards to see what has worked or not.

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