Computing stuff tied to the physical world

New LCD Plug

In Hardware on Oct 16, 2009 at 00:01

There’s a new LCD Plug on its way – hopefully this one has the correct pinout.

Here’s the schematic:

Picture 7.png

This board is based on the same MCP23008 chip as the Expander Plug. Six outputs are used to drive the LCD panel (in 4-bit mode), one output controls power to the backlight, and one spare I/O line is available for a button or a LED – this is brought out to a 2-pin connector.

A breadboard version of a similar setup was described in an earlier post. The software to drive this plug has also been presented before.

The layout of the LCD Plug is as follows:

Picture 3.png

It departs slightly from the normal plug layout, because this board is intended to mount on the back of the LCD panel. There are two solder jumpers to select between PWR and +3V for both logic and backlight. R3 is a current limiting resistor for the backlight, it can be bypassed with a third solder jumper if not needed.

Now I get to play the waiting game again, to see if it comes out ok…