Issue 132 July 2001
Liquid Crystal Delight

Start • Working Glass Hero • Quarter Horse • Software To Boot • Widge Warrior • Highway Star • Beta Site • Take It Easy •Sources & PDF
 
WORKING GLASS HERO
This brings us to the LCD.
At the low end, enjoying near commodity status, are 1 × 16 (one line of 16 characters) to 4 × 40 alphanumeric units that go back several years, based on a controller chip originally designed by Hitachi. The fact that Hitachi was once a second source for Motorola micros is seen in the 6800-type interface (E, RS, R/*W, etc.) these modules employ.

Meanwhile, high-end embedded PC apps can take advantage of the wonderful VGA-and-beyond LCDs found in laptop computers. The beauty of this approach is that you can use your favorite desktop software development tools without having to write any specialized display drivers. Because both the target and desktop systems are PCs, it’s the ultimate WYSIWYG approach.

However, there are a ton of applications that need more than a few lines of text, but don’t need (and can’t afford) the overkill of a full-blown embedded PC.

If you’re a big-shot customer, I suppose you could buy a truckload of raw glass and hack together a bunch of driver chips and low-level software to make it do something useful. Another idea is to draft some consumer electronic gadget such as a PDA, GameBoy, or even a hand-held TV into double-duty as a display.