Hello there,
I got my case today for the dual clock timer i am building. It's a small case, just big enough to hold the display and Nano and RTC board.
The problem is the display has a standard I2C backpack which allows the Nano to use just 2 pins (CLOCK and DATA) to communicate with the display.
Now that's great in itself, but the standard backpack has a pot on the back of the board to adjust the contrast, and that is great in itself too until you go to mount it in a case. The problem is that the pot is located to the left horizontally and about center vertically, so it makes it very difficult to mount anything behind the display like the Nano board because it will block access to the pot adjustment slot. That needs to be turned with a small screwdriver now and then to adjust contrast.
Removing the pot is only possible if the backpack board is removed, and to remove that requires quite a bit of difficult unsoldering of the header that mounts the backpack to the display board. So that is not really a good idea. The pot can be ground off with a Dremel, but that totally ruins it.
So the best bet seems to be to set the pot to the mid setting, then connect a new pot in parallel to the old pot. The old pot is probably the standard 10k used. The new pot may be a 5k unit.
Luckily the pin to the display adjust terminal is easy to access and solder to and so are the +5v and GND terminals.
Also thought about PWM combined with EEPROM stored up/down setting.
Any other ideas?
I got my case today for the dual clock timer i am building. It's a small case, just big enough to hold the display and Nano and RTC board.
The problem is the display has a standard I2C backpack which allows the Nano to use just 2 pins (CLOCK and DATA) to communicate with the display.
Now that's great in itself, but the standard backpack has a pot on the back of the board to adjust the contrast, and that is great in itself too until you go to mount it in a case. The problem is that the pot is located to the left horizontally and about center vertically, so it makes it very difficult to mount anything behind the display like the Nano board because it will block access to the pot adjustment slot. That needs to be turned with a small screwdriver now and then to adjust contrast.
Removing the pot is only possible if the backpack board is removed, and to remove that requires quite a bit of difficult unsoldering of the header that mounts the backpack to the display board. So that is not really a good idea. The pot can be ground off with a Dremel, but that totally ruins it.
So the best bet seems to be to set the pot to the mid setting, then connect a new pot in parallel to the old pot. The old pot is probably the standard 10k used. The new pot may be a 5k unit.
Luckily the pin to the display adjust terminal is easy to access and solder to and so are the +5v and GND terminals.
Also thought about PWM combined with EEPROM stored up/down setting.
Any other ideas?