LCD Panel Fun

**VictorB212** · Sep 7th, 2002, 10:54 PM

Want to do something like this?

If so, you need:
- soldering iron, flux & solder
- LCD panel
- male SUBD 25 pin connector (i.e. parallel port connector), or a printer cable
- 2 AA batteries and a battery holder
- a small amount of knowledge of soldering

If anyone is interested, I'll show you how to do this...

**Knowledge_is_Et** · Sep 7th, 2002, 11:48 PM

I'm sorry, but doing that kind of circuit on perfboard is so horribly frightening It took me 5 minutes to recover from the shock. Even what you did in that picture it looks scarier than elmo...Good luck to anyone else who wants to try.

very impressive...

**agent** · Sep 8th, 2002, 02:59 AM

actually, i'm very interested in how you managed to connect an lcd panel to your computer. would you mind giving me a few resources to help get me started?

was the font you used included with the lcd panel circutry? are you able to programatically set or clear the individual pixels?

i'd like to eventually hook up a large led board (those wide red ones, not the full color things you see all over the place in Las Vegas)

**Wah** · Sep 8th, 2002, 07:59 AM

kooooooooooooooool got more info ????????

**VictorB212** · Sep 8th, 2002, 08:24 AM

Knowledge_is_Et:
a) That's a wishboard, not a perfboard ;P Wishboards don't require soldering...
a) You did not read what I said the requirements were. You won't need a wishboard or any chips. Those are so I can protect my parallel port when doing questionable things and seeing the status of the pins. You can connect the parallel port directly to the LCD.

Everyone
http://www.epemag.com/lcd1.pdf is a good place to go to understand how to talk to standard character displays (which is what I use). In that pdf document you will be able to find a page that shows all the different pre-programmed characters available. In addition, you can have up to 8 user-programmed characters (where you set each individual pixel in the 5x8 grid). Once you figure them out (which was a pain and required a lot of perseverence), the instructions to control the panel are quite simple. I'm not sure anything out there does a really good job of explaining, so if you wanted to do this, I'd write up my own FAQ on the topic.

Here's a list of resources which seem to be better than what google produced: http://links.epanorama.net/links/project_display.html

Just a little warning to those who have gone off and played with this like I did, without consulting many resources: Long, unshielded wires are BAD. At first I connected the parallel port with the lcd panel using an IDE-like cable which was 3 feet long. The panel acted very weird; the reason was interference.

FYI: I keep saying parallel port because it's good to be consistent. What I'm talking about is the printer port on your computer. I'll also call it LTP1, since that's a concise way of describing it. I constructed my setup so that I'd connect the board with the computer using a standard printer cable, so I wouldn't have to construct any long cables...

**Knowledge_is_Et** · Sep 8th, 2002, 08:41 PM

Wow! Thats not all actually necessary? That is very impressive, and I thank you for putting this up. I'm an enthusiast (although I really don't know too much, I prefer High Voltage) and this is just amazing. I thought you would actually have to mess with the motherboard itself to figure out whats going on. Thank you!

P.S: I know thats not perfboard (I call them solderless circuit boards), but I figure in order to make it last more than a week I would need to actually solder it, not just put it together like you have.

**evil_gamer** · Sep 8th, 2002, 10:51 PM

Cool! I really dig this kind of stuff! Thanks and if you have more info on ICs and stuff like that, please send it to me email or PM!!!

**VictorB212** · Sep 10th, 2002, 03:02 PM

Ehh, modify that to 3 AA batteries, kinda forgot that ~5 volts is needed. All you need are the batteries and what I listed above, IC's are not required...

**Wah** · Sep 10th, 2002, 03:06 PM

where abouts could i get an lcd panel....i need a site that ships to the uk ????

**RobIII** · Sep 10th, 2002, 06:49 PM

Cool!

Please, tell us more.
You have some code? How do you control the LPT port?

**RobIII** · Sep 11th, 2002, 03:14 PM

Hellooooow... Still alive?

**VictorB212** · Sep 11th, 2002, 05:01 PM

Sorry, was busy the last few days. Here are the declares that you use w/the IO.dll that I found somewhere:

VB Code:

Public Declare Function PortIn Lib "IO" (ByVal Port As Integer) As Byte
Public Declare Sub PortOut Lib "IO" (ByVal Port As Integer, ByVal Value As Integer)
Public Declare Sub SetPortBit Lib "IO" (ByVal Port As Integer, ByVal Bit As Integer)
Public Declare Sub ClrPortBit Lib "IO" (ByVal Port As Integer, ByVal Bit As Integer)
Public Declare Sub NotPortBit Lib "IO" (ByVal Port As Integer, ByVal Bit As Integer)
Public Declare Function GetPortBit Lib "IO" (ByVal Port As Integer, ByVal Bit As Integer) As Integer
Public Declare Sub RightPortShift Lib "IO" (ByVal Port As Integer, ByVal ShiftIn As Integer)
Public Declare Sub LeftPortShift Lib "IO" (ByVal Port As Integer, ByVal ShiftIn As Integer)
 
 
Public Const DPort = &H378
Public Const SPort = &H379
Public Const CPort = &H37A

The three ports (DPort, for Data Port, CPort, for Control Port, and SPort, for status port) are the standard ports if you have an LTP1 port on your motherboard.

**RobIII** · Sep 11th, 2002, 05:11 PM

Could you post the IO.dll as well? Does it work under XP/NT/2000 or just 95/98/ME? Is it freeware?

**VictorB212** · Sep 11th, 2002, 05:25 PM

http://home.attbi.com/~labreuer/IO.DLLIt works on NT, though you have to register it under an admin account as a kernel-mode driver. It works on 9x w/out a problem. It's freeware.

**growers** · Dec 23rd, 2002, 11:08 AM

"works on NT, though you have to register it under an admin account as a kernel-mode driver."

Hello,

Could you please explain how to register a dll as a kernel-mode driver?

I want to replace inpout.dll with io.dll in an existing project to ensure Win2K compatibility, but the app crashes when any of the io.dll port procedures are called.

Interestingly my VB app works correctly if I have the parmon application (written by the same guy that wrote io.dll) running, which suggests to me that I am not initialising or registering the dll properly.

Thanks.

**VictorB212** · Dec 23rd, 2002, 03:35 PM

The reason it works when the other program is running is that io.dll is running in shared mode, where multiple programs can use it at once. Either put it in the same directory as the exe/project that you are using, or put it in the system32 folder of WINNT (or the system folder of the Windows OS you are using). The first time you try to use the functions in it, you'll get a little pop-up message that says you have to restart and logon as an administrator. After you do that, it is registered, and you can use it freely.

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