Overclockers Australia - Build your own printer cable LCD Display

Build your own printer cable LCD Display - Page 2
20-Oct-01 - Article by Wolfy
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Programming the printer port to effectively run the LCD screen is probably the most daunting task for many people. And I'll be the first to admit that my programming skills are worse than my soldering skills. The task of getting a PC to 'talk' to the LCD is probably the thing that put me off attempting this project for a long time. But recently one of our forum members pointed out LCDcenter2.0 from Borderfield. This nifty little program is simple to install and configure, requires no manual programming and works a treat. UPDATE: Seems the Borderfield website has gone away or something and people are having difficulty finding LCDCenter. We have mirrored the file for your downloading pleasure here.

Before installing LCDcenter2.0, a port I/O driver utility called Port95NT is required so that LCDcenter2.0 can capture a number of parameters from your system and send them to the LCD via the printer port. Port95NT is made by SST, but is also linked from the LCDcenter2.0 instruction webpage. Despite its name Port95NT works fine on my Windows 2000 Professional machine.

LCDcenter2.0 needs to be configured before it is run the first time; under LCD settings, select the driver for HD44780, the port speed (if applicable), and the number of rows and cols of your particular display. (Configuring the port is not required because the HD44780 driver assumes you are using the printer port.) Save the profile and start up LCDcenter2.0, and if everything goes well your LCD screen should display about eight different statistics from your system.

LCDcenter2.0 allows you to customise the rotating content shown on the LCD by setting different 'screens'. The 'screens' can be set to scroll or refresh, and will be displayed for a configurable time, before automatically switching to the next screen. For our unit, each 'screen' can display two rows of 16 characters. Each of the tabs down the left hand side of the LCDcenter Editor provide a variety of different statistics for you to select from. Each of the tabs down the left hand side of the configuration console allow you to choose what kind of information to display on each of the LCD 'screens'. The Winamp interface will display MP3 statistics, MBM will show the various temperatures, fan and CPU speeds - and is probably of most interest to overclockers. Of course you need WinAMP and/or MBM installed for those to work. LCDcenter2.0 also has the ability to show hard disk usage information, E-mail notifications, headlines from some News websites, and miscellaneous information such as how long your machine has been turned on and how much data you've received over the network.

Here are some shots of the printer-cable LCD in action:

Click images to enlarge (new window, close to return to this page)

Here's a short movie (6mb .mpg) which shows it in all its glory.

The printer-cable-LCD is an easy, quick and simple way of providing a really cool looking LCD screen to your computer system. The LCD can be mounted on your computer case and can be programmed to display a wide range of information. This whole project cost less than A$25 and took only about an hour to make. I hope now that you've seen how easy it is to do, we'll see a lot more LCD screens on the systems in the PC Database in the near future.

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