Electronics-Lab.com Blog

So cool:

The Computerless Arduino consists of two major components; an Arduino-compatible microcontroller loaded with a realtime code interpreter, and a stand-alone 5-button LCD display to display port values and manipulate code. The display can be connected to the Arduino via a 4-pin port at any time to peek at In/Out values, view the current code, and make changes as desired.

Computerless Arduino – [Link]

konstant.in writes:

I recently obtained a very old mobile phone from a friend. The battery was dead, so I dismantled it and to my surprise found a display with soldered contacts. In other mobile phones the display was connected via a conducting polymerpad, which was extremly difficult to use on selfmade circuitboards.

LPH7319 LCD display – [Link]

This tutorial shows how to use the advanced functionality of HD44780 16×2 LCD’s where you can create your own characters instead of using the built-in character set. It also gives a simple demonstration of animation on the LCD module.

The 16×2 LCD: Display Custom Characters – [Link]

LCD displays of the 2×16 variety are a good way of getting feedback from your Arduino project. If you want a more enhanced visual experience, a thin-film transistor (TFT) LCD is the superior way to go. This tutorial by Tronixstuff describes a way use the the 4D Systems 1.44″ TFT serial interface LCD with Arduino. [via]

Arduino and TFT LCD tutorial – [Link]

Markus demonstrates his OLED display sine-scroller:

The OLED board sold by SeeedStudio used I2C to communicate with the MCU. I found that updating the screen this way takes too long to get a descent refresh rate, so I modified the board to be able to access the driver chip using its SPI interface.

Updating the whole screen (128 x 64 pixel = 1024 Byte) takes now only about 1 ms, giving enough time to do some other fun stuff between updates

OLED display sine-scroller – [Link]

Reverse Engineering is an important skill for electronics hobbyists because very often you will run into something you want to use, but don’t know how. An LCD is a tough thing to reverse engineer, but this tutorial shows you one approach to figuring out how to get things working. [via]

Reverse Engineering an LCD Display – [Link]

This project describes how to measure temperature with Atmega8 and a thermistor and display it on a Nokia 3310 LCD. A thermistor is a device that changes its resistance with temperature. With a proper resistor divider network, the temperature can be measured by measuring the voltage across the thermistor. [via]

AVR displays body temperature on a Nokia 3310 LCD – [Link]

dangerousprototypes.com writes:

The Microtouch is a lightweight AVR based open source touch screen device powered by the Atmega32u4. It features a 320×240 pixel touchscreen, an accelerometer, full speed USB, a micro-SD card reader and support for a lithium ion battery. It is supported by an application framework of sorts and it is possible to run a variety of applications with varying degrees of utility.

Introducing the Microtouch – [Link]

Fabien Royer writes:

A while ago, I bought a LCD117 serial LCD backpack from Modern Device to save a few pins on my Arduino board. Everything worked great because the micro-controller, the serial backpack and the LCD display all required 5 volts for power and logic levels.

But when I tried connecting the serial LCD backpack to a netduino micro-controller, nothing worked: the netduino uses 3.3 volt logic levels while the LCD117 serial backpack expects 5 volt logic levels.

Using a 5 volts serial LCD backpack with a netduino – [Link]

Fabien writes:

I ported the Arduino driver written by Limor Fried for the SSD1306 monochrome OLED display to the netduino last week. The Arduino driver bit-bangs the data to the display controller, which is relatively slow. I attempted to speed up data transfers by driving the display using hardware SPI on the neduino. Oddly enough, this approach did not work and I have not yet found the root cause. As a result, I resorted to the bit-bang method. Because the SSD1306 OLED display supports a variety of protocols, I’ll continue investigating the issue until I can find a data transfer method yielding better performance.

Driving an SSD1306 OLED display with a netduino - [Link]