LCD interfacing with a PC

[theCheetah]

I am looking to buy an LCD to display stock quotes streamed out of a computer's serial/parallel port. If it is graphics LCD that is great but where can I find information for a newbie, how to interface the computer output to the LCD input with minimum work. Thanks for any help.

 

[pm]

I've done a couple of these, and, in fact, have a couple spare that I could sell - either prebuilt w/ parallel cable or just the LCD and driver chips ($20 for the former, $10 for the latter inc. shipping). PM me, or email if you are interested.

Anyway, these are the best instructions that I have seen here.. I use the program that they recommended on the web page and agree with them that it's very easy to use and does a good job. Using the program LCDCenter you should be able to get streaming stock quotes pretty easily. Building it is fairly easy and takes about a half hour. You need a little patience and some steady hands to connect the wires which are pretty small, but it's definitely not that tricky.

Here's a picture of one of mine showing Winamp and another showing various CPU stats. The display that I have fits perfectly in a 3.5" floppy drive slot, but I don't have any pictures of it actually inside the computer.

 

[Evadman]

I like the cable PM

And thanks for the link. I wanted to learn about these for a while.

<edit>
Wow, that is hugely easier than I thought. Now I have to figure out if that program will read sensors in my truck and display them for me

Thanks again PM.

 

[pm]

Yeah, it's pretty easy to do the hardware. About a half hour with a good pair of wire strippers and a soldering iron and it's done. Probably even less than that. And the software is ridiculously easy to use. You just tell it what you want to display.

It was far easier than I thought too. The hardest thing for me was figuring out how to mount the display into my case.



<< I like the cable PM >>

It took me longer than it should have to figure out what you meant by this. But, yeah, I didn't want solder directly to the LCD, so I interfaced using a floppy cable that only was half connected. I never even considered how silly this might look.

 

[hoihtah]

i've been looking for this info.

thanx

 

[Demon-Xanth]

http://www.eio.com/ has some cheap bare LCDs. And if you fish around there you'll find some schematics. The software part of it's the hard part

 

[pm]

The software is definitely very easy. You just download, click on the radio buttons what you want to display and it just starts running. The software that I used, LCDCenter (see link in article linked above), is Windows based and takes no time at all to set up. I have heard that Linux software is easy to find as well. Compared to the time to wire up the parallel port cable, the software was a breeze. The cable took about 20-30 minutes to strip, connect, and then get the heat shrink wrap covering it. The software took me all of 5 minutes to install and get working.

Before I started I thought the software would be the hard bit as well, but the whole project is pretty straightforward.

FWIW, the displays that I have are 2x24's with EL backlights. I wouldn't recommend anything smaller than a 1x24. 1x16 or 2x16's are simply too small to be of much use. 2x24's are about the bare minimum that I think is really useful. 2x40's actually allow a fair amount of stuff to be displayed but they take up a fair amount of space (a 5.25" slot as opposed to a 3.5" for a 2x24). But don't buy a 1x16 or 2x16. You'll probably be disappointed unless all you want to display is your CPU speed and the date.