Yeah - I learnt by trial and error to not leave my 40 x 4 lcd on the floor. My little brother decided to kick it about like a football and now all it displays is crap...
Ahh well - the wiring should take you about 10 minutes odd but make sure you can mount it where it aint gonna get bust first - think it through!
The wiring is really easy, but if you want to fork out about 3 times as much you can probably buy a pre built matrix orbital serial display. To wire up the displays, here is a few essential tools:
- A display (makes sense really...)
- A Beeping Multimeter so you can check your solder joints
- Some wire (I just cut up old cat5 network cable)
- A soldering iron (again pretty essential)
- Parallel cable to cut up and fix to the lcd (or just the ports)
- Potensiometers (variable resistors) of the correct values (get
linear not
logaritmic scale ones)
- Pliers
- Header to fix to the character display (likely to be 8x2)
Or reverse gender of the conector currently on there
- Solder, and something metal and not too precious (e.g. old saucepan) to rest your soldering iron on
- Beer (to celebrate with when you plug everything in and see trippy winamp plugins)
Beer Warning
Unless you're feeling pretty wasted already, don't drink while soldering a display. You will either burn youself or the display. However, beer is esential for when everything is working...
Anyway, I will be posting more info on my review site when I get everything sorted. If you need any more info, post here or pm / email me
Andrew
Linear Mode
