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Inexpensive USB LCD With Linux Drivers For LCDproc
Posted by
kdawson
on Sat Sep 13, 2008 05:25 PM
from the on-the-side dept.
from the on-the-side dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The Windows Vista SideShow technology shows some promise. But what about Linux devices that can present snippets of information independent of the main display? Here's a review of the picoLCD-4x20, a relatively inexpensive USB device ($50) that supports both SideShow on Vista and LCDproc on Linux."
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Submission: Inexpensive USB LCD with Linux drivers for LCDPROC by Anonymous Coward
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Homebrew angle. (Score:5, Interesting)
If you are interested in doing this yourself, look into "character LCDs" using the "HD44780" microcontroller. These are easily attached via the serial port...
Some example character lcd's and pricing [shopeio.com]
Instructable on doing a character lcd [instructables.com]
and for the lazy among you,
Google search for "character lcd hd44780" [google.com]
Grab your soldering irons and have some homebrew fun! It isn't that hard at all!
Re:Homebrew angle. (Score:4, Funny)
What's a "serial port"?
Parent
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it's the port that you pour your milk into in the morning.
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Dammit now my server has the Cap'n Crunch virus. Thanks a lot.
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Ha ha! That's funny!
No Virginia, it's where you screw the mouse.
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Bad news, I'm already using one serial port for my IR receiver, and the other to set the channel on my Tivax STB-9 Digital TV converter for recording with my PVR.
So I guess I'm just too geeky for the HD44780 microcontroller. Wow.
(But seriously, do these work with USB to Serial converters?)
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Got a parallel port? It's even easier. A 44780 based display won't work with a serial port unless you have a separate micro to do translation.
What Linux Device? (Score:5, Interesting)
What about them? How is this a Linux "device"? It doesn't run Linux, it comes with drivers that make it compatible with LCDproc.
Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but if we're going to set the bar that low I'm going to go out and tell my friends that my Microsoft mouse is a "Linux device" because there's driver support for it on that platform.
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Your mouse is a device. If it works with Linux, it's a Linux device. That seems fair enough. If it doesn't work with Linux, it's clearly not a Linux device. So off you go, tell your friends.
I just got one-upped by my friend. While I have a Microsoft "Linux Device" mouse, he has an Intel "Windows Vista Chip" ICH7 Southbridge controller.
Zero-click information retrieval (Score:3, Interesting)
It may seem a bit "retro" to be using a character LCD for information display, but from a user interface perspective, there's lots of data that is still textual (e-mail subjects, news, etc) that is nice to have outside of the main work area of our primary monitor displays. Even as resolutions have increased particularly for desktop monitors, the idea that there's a separate device dedicated for a separate stream of information can be a useful notion because it's a "zero-click" way of getting to that knowledge, without dedicating primary monitor real estate there or making annoying popups.
There's really just a lot of information streams that don't deserve sexy RGB pixels on one's display, and the mental association of looking at a specific gadget to get a specific stream of information is a strong one. Until we have ultra-cheap projectors everywhere and make better use of display surfaces, this is a step in that direction.
--
Electronics kits for the digital generation! Microcontroller, LCD, gcc compiler, and more. [nerdkits.com]
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Re:Zero-click information retrieval (Score:4, Interesting)
I just wish we'd go back to a bios-based LCD, for when the screen won't work, the ram won't load in, or something similar. A way to indicate a crash without using beeps... Some environments are so noisy it's just not possible to distiguish some combinations.
Parent
Using with Windows XP? (Score:2)
Does anyone out there actually HAVE one of these?
I wrote them on Friday but they haven't responded yet (which isn't too surprising). I'd love to have one, but the computer I want to use it with uses XP, not Vista or Linux. I've used LCDProc before, but there is no Windows port. I looked at the driver for this thing but it looks like it sends direct USB command (i.e. it doesn't just appear as a serial port). I spend my time in Java (due to my job) so that's what I'd like to program it in, but the main Java-
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According to their site, jUSB, despite being dead, never worked on Windows. Have you tried libusbjava [sourceforge.net]? I'm neither a Java nor Windows developer, so this is a suggestion and not a recommendation. I can vouch for libusb on Unix though.
!cheap (Score:3, Informative)
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What I wanted to say as well, $50 at this date for something that shitty is expensive as hell, you get a replacement touchscreen LCD for the DS for like 3.5 dollar or something, and that one is 18 bit 256x192. Who cares about text on LCDs of today? You can probably get that Logitech keyboard with display for that price and use that instead ...
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This LCD has 4x20x8x5 = 3200 pixels
That's over $15 per 1k pixels
Standard color LCD 1024*800 = 819200 pixels
That's less than $0.1 per 1k pixels
So you pay x150 more for those pixels without color just to have a few buttons ?
Not cheap enough for sure !
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Add a USB cable, a few buttons and a plastic shell. With the display and the controller, that's a total of maybe $10 in parts, retail, one-of prices. $50 for the final product is an acceptable price, if you must have the small form factor or the low power consumption, but it is not "inexpensive" or "cheap". You can buy 1024x768 TFTs for $50...
too little, too much (Score:5, Informative)
While I'm sure that a very small number of people will buy into this, I find it very disappointing and very limited, and pretty damn expensive for what you get. I compare this to my Logictech G15 LCD graphic display device. I paid $60 for mine a little over a year ago, it runs on USB, has similar input buttons near the display, but it does full graphics, and a number of nice aplets are already written for it (although far too few). Oh yea, it also happens to include a full illuminated keyboard, multimedia volume knob and mute button, and 18 user definable macro keys (expandable to 54 or more using the 3 "bank" buttons - but unfortnately the newer version of the Logitech G15 reduces this to just 6 user definable buttons). And they throw in a few extra USB ports too. While some people might not want to use a keyboard with their computer, I kind of suspect that most do, and that mounting a full graphic capable similar sized LCD on a Luminated keyboard is a far better way to go for the vast majority of users, and that a $50 price for just an alpha-numeric display is a bit expensive. Too bad they didn't make it Logitech G15 [wikipedia.org] compatible and put it out at a lower price, but I don't see a likely broad use for this gimic when the G15 is still available, even with it's reduced number of fumction keys in the new version.
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How's that keyboard work velcroed to a server rack so you can read CPU frequency and server load without firing up a monitor?
Devices like this are kind of like the Eee PC. If you get it, it's great. If you don't, it makes no sense whatsoever.
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Or you could just get one of those LCD picture keychains that has something like a 65c02 with a usb interface. 1 or 2 inch graphic lcd that does 20-30 frames per second.
And you can get them for under $30. Some as low as $15.
http://spritesmods.com/?art=picframe&page=3&showall=true [spritesmods.com]
Although last time I checked the software was linux only.
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Needs to be a bit larger for $50USD (Score:2)
What I would like... (Score:2)
There are tons of DYI's for this stuff out there. But what would be interesting, is taking a dead laptop display, and being able to rig it up to my pc, maybe hanging off the wall near the base, being able to display pictures, or data, not like being a second monitor which I have, but as a display of information like weather from my local station, or remote, or pictures or whatever.
Now that would be interesting...
4x20? luxury, when I were a kid... (Score:3, Informative)
I got a working one of those kicking about in my shed, any ideas what I could do with it? besides trying to find replacement rechargable batteries.
Logitech G15 anyone? (Score:3, Interesting)
Embedded USB Drivers? (Score:2)
Why doesn't every USB device come with its drivers embedded in the device itself, accessible out of the box over the basic USB driver that any OS should come with, which just retrieves the real device driver across the USB, installs it, and then uses it to access the real dev
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There are also the security issues. Does the world really need even more things that execute blobs of mystery code when you connect them?
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I don't think these drivers are going to take more than a 64MB Flash ROM, which can't cost more than $1 wholesale. If every USB client chip had "driver Flash" in it, the whole cost couldn't go up much. And saving on the entire process of burning and including a CD would cut into that extra expense, while lowering support costs. USB is more expensive than RS-232, but has taken over because of those kinds of savings and marketable benefits.
The security issues are exactly the same with the driver embedded in t
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We put drivers for the version of Windows, Mac and Linux on the device, if we think those markets justify the cost.
Why would we need any other way than embedding and a website to get the drivers?
The only part of the driver model that needs to be standard is the one that gets the real driver off the USB device.
This problem isn't nearly as complex or hard as you make it out.
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I agree that driver installation is an unnecessary evil, but I don't see that going away any time soon. Standards bodies for interfaces like USB can only come up with so many standard device classes, so inevitably some new and innovative (or old and unpopular as in this example) product will come out that won't fit into one.
But I don't think companies will find it practical to use your method. Once you've paid for a flash chip, a micro with enough oomph and extra I/Os to run USB mass-storage and talk to a
Re:Or maybe... (Score:5, Insightful)
According to the article you posted, support for *nix is patchy:
Furthermore, using an entire monitor defeats the entire purpose of these devices. These are small, compact devices that are meant to show some vital information at all times with minimum power drain. Running a monitorless server? Put the server load onto one of these things. The server's a spam filter? Put the number of rejected emails per hour on it.
It doesn't serve as a substitute for performance alerts, but for $40 it's not bad for real-time monitoring when you don't have a monitor or terminal available
Parent
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According to the article you posted, support for *nix is patchy:
According to the link for the product [mini-box.com] included in the article specs include:
* Linux drivers and OpenSource SDK
I'm no expert, but it sounds like at least Linux is supported (though for all I know, the drivers could be next to useless - I've never used them) - the article does a poor job of mentioning this
The thing that really confuses me about this device is this: USB 2.0 full speed device - if you send USB 2.0 full speed data (at full rate) at a display that only has 80 characters to display, it will b
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In USB parlance, "full speed" means that the device supports 12Mbps transactions. It has no bearing on the throughput the device must sustain. And the 2.0 part is just marketing fluff: any full speed device is compatible with the 2.0 spec by way of legacy support for 1.1. For the record, "high speed" is the official term for 480Mbps USB, not 2.0.
Standards organizations are weird.
Re:That fine article is old. (Score:5, Insightful)
it's easy enough to spy on the USB port and get the protocol
Your definition of easy isn't the same as mine!
Parent
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I would probably have gone with USBspy [everstrike.com] because I'm not afraid of commercial software, I just prefer the other kind. I'm sure Sourceforge [sourceforge.net] has something to solve the problem but I'm not actively seeking an answer today so it's better if the grandparent does the rest of this work himself.
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Why? (Score:3, Insightful)
Because you could do the same job with a 320x200 USB photo frame for $50, and do it with color images?
Was that not the answer you were looking for?
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I hope this has been helpful.
So helpful was your advice that I travelled back in time and availed myself of Google to make this post [slashdot.org].
If you had bothered to Google this you would have seen that cheap, platform independent and real time frames do not exist. They are not real time, they are not platform independent and they are not in the $50 price range.
Do not make a recommendation for a platform independent, real time, $50 USB frame when they do not exist
Then again, the only thing to do with good advice is pass it on. It is never any us
You're confused. (Score:2)
The solution to this problem is to ignore proprietary codecs. In time they all go away, stranding all the content encoded on them. All the smart people are done converting their data from one proprietary format into another. Once media are encoded in open standards they can remain there forever and you avoid the reencoding work for the rest of forever. If you have the White Album on MP3, you don't ev
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My reading skills seem to be fine, thank you. You wrote:
> The solution to this problem is to ignore proprietary codecs.
MP3 is patented in various ways, and still remains an extremely popular, perhaps even the most popular, audio codec. It hasn't 'gone away', and ignoring it will ignore a huge amount of both the available audio material and the available hardware. Simply 'ignoring' it doesn't work.
And unfortunately, 'ignoring' codecs by converting files from one codec to another can run you afoul of the D
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Open: Everyone and their grandma's cat has a competing implementation.
Alternately, implementing the standard can be treated as a class
project for first year CIS undergraduates.
Whether or not it's "patent encumbered" is another matter.