cheaper large instrument displays - mast mount

Having experimented with my 128x64 display I am now of the opinion that this resolution is too low. The photos I showed of a prototype I made a decade ago way back in this thread used a 240x128 resolution display, and I think this should be used again. It was an RS display I used before, and the equivalent now seems to be this one for £36 inc VAT, price for buying 10...

http://uk.rs-online.com/web/p/lcd-displays-mono-graphic/5327221/

which I think has been identified earlier on this thread.

The one I have been using so far is fine for early protoyping though. It would need a driver change to go to this display, but that's not too onerous. I already have suitable bitmaps for this resolution.
 
It looks like we can get a reasonable discount for a 'bulk' order..anyone else want some screens.

As Angus has shown, this is looking pretty good so far...any thoughts on screens etc. Personally i quite like the green effect of the one at RS, although screens that could do RGB backlights would be great (although if fixed i do like a black background with white text, looks pretty awesome at night). Lookign through the previous threads it would be a transmissive display, backlit about 6" x 4" and with easy solder connections.

I am quite happy to buy 2 displays for prototyping, 1 for me and 1 for angus to carry on playing with, however i would like to get these as near to the final specs that people would like so that any drivers etc are correct

Any feedback?
 
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ShaunG said:
hopefully i will be able to understand the driver fully bt the end of the week..

I see that that one http://uk.rs-online.com/web/p/lcd-displays-mono-graphic/5327186/ seems to have the same chipset as the last RS one you sugested, just looks a little nicer (to my eyes) in white on black
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It's the bright sunlight viewability that would concern me, but the only way would be to try. In my opinion clarity in all lighting conditions is more important than whether the colours are pleasing. Typical displays on the market are boring black on light grey, but as the light gets brighter, they get easier to read.

It's fairly easy to change the driver with a change of display anyway, especially if the resolution is the same.
 
ShaunG said:
hopefully i will be able to understand the driver fully bt the end of the week..

I see that that one http://uk.rs-online.com/web/p/lcd-displays-mono-graphic/5327186/ seems to have the same chipset as the last RS one you sugested, just looks a little nicer (to my eyes) in white on black
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I just love datasheets written in Chinglish...

It is impossible to save status check in the case of command of MSB0. To have the delay time cannot be save status check. The interrupt of hardware is happened at the end of lines. If command of MSB0 is sent in this period, the command executing is waited. The state of waiting doesn't be known without to check status. The sending next command or data is disregarded or rewrite data of waiting command.
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What's Chinese for wtf?
 
i have no idea...but could easily be the most helpful bit of chinese i could ever learn.

I have looked at a couple of other datasheets that use T6396C controller and they all seem to written the same. I guess the answer is to find a true manfacturer outside of china...which might be a little difficult
 
ShaunG said:
i have no idea...but could easily be the most helpful bit of chinese i could ever learn.

I have looked at a couple of other datasheets that use T6396C controller and they all seem to written the same. I guess the answer is to find a true manfacturer outside of china...which might be a little difficult
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Or just find a sample driver already written for the T6396C . Everything has been done before.
 
ShaunG said:
i have no idea...but could easily be the most helpful bit of chinese i could ever learn.

I have looked at a couple of other datasheets that use T6396C controller and they all seem to written the same. I guess the answer is to find a true manfacturer outside of china...which might be a little difficult
Click to expand...

I had myself and several other rolling about on the floor after letting Google try to translate Chinese text to English. Occasional sentences were perfectly OK, but the rest :D:D:D !

Absolutely huge quantities of these displays are made in China, which is why they are a reasonable price. In Arduino Mega - I have no shortage of digital I/O so can use 16 bits parallel (6800 style protocol). I have not needed to build a chip driver as most of the common TFT graphics chips have been covered by existing TFT libraries. Thank goodness.
I'm really interfacing with hardware round the boat, rather than parsing NMEA (or similar) data. The only digital data I'm reading is NMEA from the GPS module (serial UART), and I2C barometric pressure & temperatiure data. The rest is primarily A-D.
I think the scale of what you guys can extract / re-process from NMEA & SEAtalk is probably wider, but you are probably not trying to connect a 22 year old boat to the 21st century:rolleyes:

Arduino is programmed in a C++ variant . Been messing around with some custom large numerical fonts though. I'll try posting some displays once I get home.

Graeme
 
Just spoken to a sparky about controlling the LCD contrast and backlight level from software on either of the RS display. Seems we will need a couple of extra components to be able to do this, but nothing more than £1 in total. The contrast will be driven using the STM32's I2C or SPI interface, and the backlight level by PWM output driving a FET. Some more TLA's to Goggle there :)

Looking around there's plenty of sample code for the T6396C driver chip which can be ported to our processor.
 
pagoda said:
I had myself and several other rolling about on the floor after letting Google try to translate Chinese text to English. Occasional sentences were perfectly OK, but the rest :D:D:D !
Click to expand...

Interestingly, I have used Google translate to translate fairly poetic English (a Celtic prayer) into Chinese, and it worked very well - at least, my wife tells me it did!

The same prayer was also translated into Indonesian, to the amazement and wonder of my wife's mother's Indonesian maid.

I know a few polite phrases in Cantonese, and no Indonesian whatsoever!

Note that (at least in theory) all the Chinese languages are written the same; the SPOKEN languages are very different from each other, but they are all written in the same way. Ideograms do have some advantages.
 
ShaunG said:
That's at least in English...well..I think it is...been reading it for the last hour to see if I can make any sense of it...current verdict...no..maybe I need to sleep on it
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It's not as bad as it looks.

CE line - just wire that to low permanently and forget.
RST line - bounce it on power-up then forget.
D0-D7 - wire to a GPIO port for data reading and writing
C/D - set depending on whether you are reading/writing a command or data
RD - bounce this down and up then read D0-D7
WR - write to D0-D7 then bounce this down and up

Before you do anything on this controller you need to check its status. To do this you set C/D to command, do a read, and check the status. When the display is not busy then you can send the next command.

There are loads of examples of code for this controller out there. The code could be ported to the STM32 easily. The timings need to be correct according to the datasheet, but the quick and dirty way to do this is to put delays in everywhere, and reduce/remove them until it doesn't work, then put them back.
 
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