Project: Interface with a Serial LCD

Machine(s): None | Material(s): LCD Screen

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Official Assignment Description: 'add an ouput device to a microcontroller board and program it to do something'

I decided to hijack this week and work on my final project; the relevant component of that project is an interface with an LCD screen. I've used LCD screens a couple times in the past, but am always annoyed by the communication protocols and the number of pins you need to connect to it. A couple of weeks ago I noticed Sparkfun was selling an LCD screen with a built-in PIC that translated input serial communication to the built-in LCD controller. This seemed too good to pass up, so the first part of this week's project was an effort to learn how to communicate with it etc. The second part of this week's project (perhaps more challenging), was to develop a code that could do the following:

Both 'parts' had their challenges; below is my efforts to address them.

LCD Communication

Step 1: Learning to communicate with the LCD screen was relatively simple at 9600 BAUD. The Arduino community was pretty helpful in trouble-shooting. One annoying quirk was that there was no built-in way of handling floating point numbers. I eventually just decided to multiply the floats by 100 and show their integer value (see 'Radians*100 below). The PIC also required that you wait approximately 1ms between sending serial commands / strings...which I don't remember being an issue on the standard LCD's.

Step 2: Realize I need faster communication than 9600bps and try to change it. The data sheet said I could just write "control p" to the serial port to change to 38400bps, which seemed simple enough (see pdf file). (Oh, who's ever heard of sending 'control' in ASCII? Not me, but fortunately internet forums came to the rescue.) This turned out not to be the case; half the time the LCD screen wouldn't recognize my commands, and half the time it would simply 'lock up.' Fortunately there is a reset command (which I used many times). In the end, I finally coaxed it to run at 19200bps, but need to tell my serialSoft connection to run at 19300...which is odd because both the PIC and the ATmega are using crystals. Sigh. Below is what it looks like when communication speeds are not synced.
SerLCD_V2_5.pdf

Step 3: Write code. I opted to use Arduino software and hardware at this point, because I know they both work well. The code was actually pretty challenging to write because it required a short 1-2ms pulse to be sent out of three digital pins every 25ms for servo control (if the pulse is not sent out regularly every 25ms the servos will not function correctly). I attempted to use an interrupt-based solution, but ran into trouble because the interrupt would essentially need to return a 'goto' command (to restart the 25ms sequence) and / or call a function with nested delay functions. Both approaches came up short, so I settled on riddling my code with 'time check' functions...if current time elapsed less than 25ms, continue; else send pulses and restart loop. It's not a particularly elegant solution but it seems to work. The screen shot below is an oscilliscope showing pulses every 25ms.
gimbal_code1.pde

Tips and Lessons Learned

  1. The serial LCD screen has some great features: it's easy to use and it only requires one pin. But changing BAUD rate was difficult and frustrating...almost frustrating enough to want to go buy a regular LCD...
  2. Use the serialsoft library instead of the hardware serial (if using Arduino). The internet forums had a few people that accidently left the LCD plugged into the hardware serial during programming and it messed up their LCD (or the PIC, rather).
  3. Getting the microcontroller to send a pulse every 25ms was difficult...has anyone else ever encountered this?

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