[McHUG] Shields and LCDs

[Rich Mitchell]

Over the past week I was able to play a bit more with the Arduino shield.  I added to the prototype board that had the receiver the necessary connectors for a four databit LCD setup using the LiquidCrystal library.  Two Monday nights ago Dave had mentioned that the library had changed to not use the R/W pin (it can be tied to ground, so one less connection).  I ran into that.  The new Liquid Crystal library has been distributed with Arduino 0017 and following.  If you are using 0016 or earlier and want to take advantage of the new library, you will have to download and install it.  It is probably easier just to upgrade to the latest Arduino level.  

I had built a four wire LCD connector on a piece of Radio Shack perf board a few years ago.  It's pins would fit into a breadboard and connect to a 2x7 cable running to the LCD.  So now I could connect the R/W pin directly to ground and save a digital pin.  I got that running fine by itself.  But the minute I added code to the setup for VirtualWire it died.  

Next I tried running two different LCDs with different messages at the same time, one using the 4 databit LiquidCrystal library and the other using SoftwareSerial with Peter Anderson's serial set up.  At first they stepped on each other because the serial data wire was also using one of the 4 databit pins.  So I switch the serial data pin using the jumper on the BUB shield and changed it in the program.  (Remember I build the BUB shield so the serial data wire could be jumpered to data pins 2 through 13.)  They behaved beautifully together.  

I think I am going to set the receiver project aside and start working on a clock repairing application.  One of the things you do with pendulum clocks is to try to put them in beat.  That means that the tics and the tocs are evenly spaced from each other.  At lunch I hope to head out to Radio Shack for an Electret mic, a 2N3904, and a few resistors and capacitors.

Anybody up for a meet to eat?

toc, toc, tic, tic, tic     tic, tic, tic, toc, toc  (73)
Rich, N3III
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