[Lcdproc] Sparkfun

[Ethan Dicks]

On 12/4/09, Lucius Mare <luciusmare at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,is it possible to use lcdproc along with the LCDs sold on sparkfun? (
> http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/categories.php?c=148 )
> They claim it to be "basic LCD" but I am not sure, I will be making an order
> soon, and shipping is costy today, so I want to know it, it would be nice to
> buy something along so i wont waste so much on shipping.

The "Basic LCDs" on Sparkfun are ordinary-HD44780-interface LCDs, but
the graphical ones may have controller chips that LCDproc supports -
check the LCDproc documentation for how to attach one of those to your
computer.  If your computer does not happen to have a parallel port,
you will also need to choose and purchase (and possibly construct) a
microcontroller-based "backpack" to do the formatting.   There are
many flavors of those supported by LCDproc - I have built several.
For those, typically, you would need a free serial port or USB port,
depending on which "backpack" interface you decide to go with.  The
"Serial Enabled LCDs" sold by Sparkfun probably do not have an LCDproc
driver at this time (they appear to use ASCII codes below 0x20 for
some cursor functions and codes above 0x80 for positioning, and do not
appear to allow the host to set custom characters).

I do not know anything about the "Graphic LCD Serial Backpack", so I
cannot recommend if it does or does not accept a command set that
LCDproc understands, but if I had to guess, I'd expect it does not.

-ethan