Considerations for character lcd's?

ddt · 03-31-2003, 10:09 PM

What should I consider when purchasing a character lcd from ebay, other than availability of a datasheet, to use with the various winamp plugins? Like does it NEED to be 16 x 4 or 40 x 4 or are these plugins configureable?

I know nothing about these plugins or character lcd's in general so spell it out for me.

Thanks!

Raas · 04-01-2003, 03:04 AM

Hi,

I´ve been playing around with the markuszehnder plugin v0.6 lately. I use it with a 40x4 and I´m pretty impressed.. Like almost anything is configurable: Where you want to put which information. It also has an menu that is displayed and where you can select the options. It also supports multiple inputs, from keyboard to parallel and serial, and even WinLirc works. It even has an on-screen simulation so you can test it out on your monitor when you don´t even have an lcd attached to your computer.. The plugin is constantly in developement as the last version is only a bit older than a month... Oh yeah... the plugin also works with the albumlist plugin, so you can browse your albums and artist on your lcd. It also supports playlists which you can choose. You can define custom characters to be displayed... you can have multiple output-set to a display, so that it displays a lot more information about a song, or hardware things like mem usage, cpu usage, drive usage, when the player is like in pause-mode, and then have the normal screen back, when you continue playing..
Eurrrrrhhhhmmm... did I forget something ?
Check it out.. it´s really cool
http://www.markuszehnder.ch/projects/lcdplugin

Greetz,

BTW... 600 posts... yay !!!!

Charliey · 04-01-2003, 06:29 PM

Most of the sizes are standard, 8,16,20,40 wide are supported in all software i think, with either 1,2 or 4 lines of text.

Ive seen some 24 character wide ones, and im pretty sure they arent supported in all software.

You can either get serial or parallel, although i think the cheap ones on ebay will all be parallel. Make sure its HD44780 compatable as that is the standard controller chip. Theres a few different chips that are they same spec, i know theres one by epson, then some other japanese companies. Im pretty sure almost all of them are HD44780 compatable, but just something to double-check.

Raas · 04-02-2003, 06:53 AM

Well, i know for sure that if one bought a 20x4 and played with it for a little while he would regret it, that he hadn´t bought a bigger one..

nowadays the char.lcd are not that much used here, every1 is going for tft´s but back in the days when the char.lcd´s caused a lot off talk in the forums here, anyone would say, "Go with 40x4, bigger is better"

(if your dash has some more room where the 1 din HU would be placed, you could place the 40x4 there.. the print is just slightly bigger than the 1din dimmensions...)

greetz,

ddt · 04-02-2003, 12:04 PM

This is more for a HTPC I'm wokring on.

Thanks for the info guys.

digitalww · 04-02-2003, 12:30 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by ddt
This is more for a HTPC I'm wokring on.

Thanks for the info guys.

Check out these sites, lots of good ideas:

http://iceforums.net/lcd/?f=view&PHP...cac1a200aa156d

and

this one for plugins http://liquid-mp3.schijf.org/

Armen

Raas · 04-03-2003, 03:41 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by ddt
This is more for a HTPC I'm wokring on.

Thanks for the info guys.

That´s also I want to do sometime...

yeah,

If you would take MediaEngine, MyHTPC, MarkusZehnder Plugin and some PVR/TV/TimeShifting software... , throw it in a blender and mix it all toghether you would have a really cool app..

Like all info that is displayed on normal stand-alone VCR´s DVD´s SAT´s would be displayed on the char.lcd..

Now that would be really cool....
and it would be the only device needed (except for an amp and tv)

New project guys

???

Greetz,

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