Over the past couple of weeks I have been struggling with the decision to either purchase an LCD display and keypad or to find one and use it.
After much thought, I finally realized I had a keypad with a display from work and decided that since we had a couple of them I would use one, at least temporarily (will get back to this later).
Okay so I disassembled the keypad unit and removed the LCD and its board, luckily the LCD was plugged in to the keypad board in a simple manner.
Then I did some searching and some trial and error testing until I could determine which pins on the LCD board where supposed to be plugged in where on the Arduino.
I was mostly helped by the Arduino Graphical LCD (DLCD) display library and its webpage which had a nice wiring "Default" schematic to start from.
The video below shows a simple demo Arduino script provided by the GLCD library that listens for input from your keypad and displays it on the Arduino.
All well and good, the display works, the contrast is adjustable and based on other examples I've seen, we could do all kinds of fancy things, like measuring the light levels and/or the temperature and adjusting the contrast and backlight brightness.
The next video shows another demo Arduino script provided by the GLCD library to show some of the capabilities of the library and the display.
From the video you could guess that it wouldn't be too difficult to write other games (pong, asteroids) or other features such as a clock.
While I am extremely happy that I have got this display to work, there are some problems:
1) The display requires a heck of a lot of space/ports on my Arduino board, 15 to be precise (my board has not much more than this).
2) I still don't have a keypad that works, the one from the unit doesn't seem to interface to the Arduino in any simple manner. I suspect the keypad board has its own micro controller which then just ouputs some serial data or something.
The first problem is the biggest one for me, I think. I'm not sure how many ports my camera time-lapse project will require, but I think more than just a couple. I'd like to have some fun and fancy features (GPS triggering, light triggering, sound triggering, etc) that will require inputs.
That, said, I'm not sure that I can't get around this. Will have to think about it a bit.
Next up will be getting a keypad that works.
Justin
While I am extremely happy that I have got this display to work, there are some problems:
1) The display requires a heck of a lot of space/ports on my Arduino board, 15 to be precise (my board has not much more than this).
2) I still don't have a keypad that works, the one from the unit doesn't seem to interface to the Arduino in any simple manner. I suspect the keypad board has its own micro controller which then just ouputs some serial data or something.
The first problem is the biggest one for me, I think. I'm not sure how many ports my camera time-lapse project will require, but I think more than just a couple. I'd like to have some fun and fancy features (GPS triggering, light triggering, sound triggering, etc) that will require inputs.
That, said, I'm not sure that I can't get around this. Will have to think about it a bit.
Next up will be getting a keypad that works.
Justin
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