Blog
Today we have repaired the Samsung LCD monitor with model no: 943NW , he come with symptoms that monitor off after 2 seconds.
I opened it and saw that the electrolyte (100uF/400v) cracked, then I replaced the new capacitor, but the problem is still here, the monitor turns off after 2 seconds, I tried the other new CCFL lamps but now shuts down after 30 sec, in that period as the monitor for i felt that the inverter transformer smell the melted plastic.
Repairing LCD Monitor Samsung 943NW – [Link]
Tic Tac Touch @ The Custom Geek… [via]
OK, so I haven’t posted in a while because I have been working on some bigger projects, but yesterday, I took a two hour break and made a 2 player tic tac toe game. I did this with an Arduino and a 2.8″ touchshield from Adafruit.com. It’s pretty basic tic tac toe, and has score tracking, game logic (you can’t go twice in a row, and telling you if you win), and the ability to consume a chunk of time playing tic tac toe with my son. Below is the code, feel free to hack modify etc. If you play against a smart person (or yourself), you will have lots of Mosfet eye games!
Tic Tac Touch - [Link]
follower presents his project using a USB accessory to create a “dual screen” Nexus One with SMS notification & time display. Besides the Nexus One phone, the hardware consists of an Arduino Duemilanove with ATmega328, a SparkFun USB Host Shield and 2×16 LCD display. This hack is made possible by Android’s Open Accessory API. [via]
The sketch listens for bytes sent over the USB connection and displays them on the LCD–it special-cases two values to determine which row of the display text should be displayed on.
The Android App is invisible and starts automatically when you connect the accessory. (You probably need to approve the running of the application within a few seconds or the accessory may time out.) A background service is started which displays a notification of the accessory found, listens for new text messages and starts sending the current time to the accessory for display. You can use your phone as normal while the service is running in the background.
When the accessory is disconnected the notification is removed and the background service cleans up after itself before stopping.
Full source code and further details are available at follower’s labradoc webpage.
Dual-screen Nexus One – [Link]
civicbynature writes -
Thanks to jersagfast @ TheCustomGeek. He wrote an awesome menu program for adafruits 2.8tft breakout board. It has 5 different menu areas as well as a settings area for backlight brightness and sleep timers which saves the settings to EEPROM so the settings are saved even when there’s no power. Plus many more features. I have added many updates. It is now both UNO and Mega 1280/2560. compatible.
I have also added the ability to read actual Vcc voltages at the core using the Bandgap method For accurate voltage readings and sensor readings. And more. If you’d like to check out the latest code it’s available Here on my site.
Cool 2.8″ TFT Touch project… - [Link]
Send a Tweet to Your Office Door @ IEEE Spectrum Erico writes – [via]
Here at IEEE Spectrum, staffers routinely put Post-It notes on their doors and cubicles to let colleagues know they’re out. But you can’t slap a note on your door if you decide to work at home at the last minute—which, as I learned this winter, happens quite often when you have a very pregnant wife about to go into labor any instant.
That’s why I set out to replace those yellow sheets of self-adhesive stationery with something less, uh, analog—something that would allow me to post the updates electronically. An idea then popped up in my head: Twitter for my door.It turns out to be a simple DIY project that an experienced hobbyist can complete in a few hours. Or if you’re me and this is your first serious hardware project, it might take you a couple of months and nearly drive you insane.
It worked out in the end. Now, when I’m home—or actually anywhere with my phone—I can send a tweet to a small LCD that hangs by my door, thus keeping my coworkers informed of my whereabouts. The LCD also shows current weather conditions in New York City; I thought my colleagues would appreciate this value-added service.
Send a Tweet to Your Office Door - [Link]
HOW TO – build a $23 graphic LCD shield… from thoughtfix in the Adafruit customer forums.
All I did was follow the instructions for the Nokia 5110 LCD EXACTLY how they were described at http://ladyada.net/products/nokia5110/ with two notable exceptions. First, I used +5V (shown in the pink wire in the drawing, white wire on the results) for the LED backlight. Second, I followed the pin traces around the proto shield used in the example and built that onto the underside of the Adafruit proto shield!
I had difficulty with the wire at such short runs. Specifically, I had insulation shrinking when I set the soldering iron hot enough to melt the solder to the wires. A more experienced person (or higher quality wire insulation) could avoid this. The LED uses one of the +5V rail connectors on the Proto Shield’s PCB and the “open” rail gathers 3.3V to share with the LCD and the driver.
HOW TO – build a $23 graphic LCD shield - [Link]
Big Mess o’ Wires has a Low-Power LCD Smackdown… [via]
Sometimes it seems like there are a million different LCDs you might use with your microcontroller project, and deciding on one can be hard. Once you’re ready to move beyond a basic text display, you’ll find graphic displays have a dizzying number of options for technology, color depth, interface type, driver, and power. Recently I’ve been collecting info on display options for my own projects, and here I’m presenting three options that look promising.
Low-Power LCD Smackdown – LCD reviews! – [Link]
adafruit.com writes:
2.8 TFT Touch Shield for Arduino. Spice up your Arduino project with a beautiful large touchscreen display shield with built in microSD card connection. This TFT display is big (2.8″ diagonal) bright (4 white-LED backlight) and colorful (18-bit 262,000 different shades)! 240×320 pixels with individual pixel control. It has way more resolution than a black and white 128×64 display. As a bonus, this display has a resistive touchscreen attached to it already, so you can detect finger presses anywhere on the screen.
2.8 TFT Touch Shield for Arduino - [Link]
Miniature version of LCD2USB device, a lcd driver connected to usb port. Because the original pcb was too complicated for home-make, i have projected new pcb – all parts is surface-mounted, pcb width is width of 16 pin connector which is fit exactly behind lcd. I used mini-usb connector, ATMega8 in TQFP package, and some of other SMT parts. As pcb is modified, it need modified firmware available for download below. Rest of description is available on original autor site.
Miniature LCD driver – LCD2USB + frontpanel - [Link]
Fabien wrote a great tutorial on using the Adafruit TFT display with a Netduino. He writes: [via]
AdaFruit recently released a sweet little TFT display that I was dying to hook up to a netduino: the display features a resolution of 128*160 pixels, is capable of showing 18-bit colors and has a microSD card reader on the back of the breakout board. As usual, Limor wrote a nicely detailed Arduino tutorial showing how to connect the display and how to write sketches to drive it.
The Arduino driver relies on the ability of the Atmega168/368 to toggle digital lines extremely fast, which does not work well on the netduino due to the latency introduced by the .Net Micro Framework: even when configured to use hardware SPI, the Arduino driver constantly toggles a data/command output line, rspin below, which would be unbearably slow on the netduino if the same method were applied.
The netduino has one advantage over the Arduino: it has plenty of RAM. So, instead of toggling I/O lines slowly all the time and using next to zero RAM, the netduino driver allocates a 40K buffer corresponding to the resolution of the display in 12-bit depth colors (16 bits per pixel) and leaves the ST7735 in ‘data’ mode upon initialization.
Drawing always happens on the internal buffer first. Then, whenever the actual display needs refreshing, the display I/O operations are performed using hardware SPI, blasting the entire 40K buffer. It may sound crazy but using this method on the netduino is faster than refreshing a single pixel while toggling an I/O line!
Driving an Adafruit TFT Display with a Netduino – [Link]
