LCD 5.25 drive bay project.

[Rogue5]

I'm not sure if my advisor would find this a suitable senior project (Electrical Engineering, UNH), but figured I'd do a little investigating on my own first.

The idea is to replace an open 5.25" drive bay (a spare CD drive bay) on my computer with an LCD. the plan is to have the LCD utilize a couple different modes, hopefully a digital clock, maybe a few pre-designed messages and designs, and hopefully allow users to make their own designs.

The main questions involves the programming aspect of the project, I took a class on C, and have self taught myself some basics of C++. How involved is it to get printer port access using C++. How hard would it be to make a program that displays a grid, where the user could select which positions to be darked out, so they could make their own designs or messages?

I've taken a class where we did some assembly coding to make an LCD display different messages in response to keypad input (PC-based interfaced with some type of motorola microcontroller...) and I think i could handle most of the hardware side without much problem, the major variable is whether or not I could get enough of a handle on C++ to make it work.


Thanks for any input or suggestions you guys might have.

 

[plot]

Well, I'm assuming you use windows, in which case accessing the printer port is a major pain, becuase windows restricts access to it for stability reasons. The serial port on the other hand, is alot easier to play around with becuase everyone has access, so it's what I'd recommend using. Only downside to serial is it's a bit slower, and the LCDs for it cost more. "Computer Modding" lcd's into those bays is actually a very popular thing to do, so there are alot of prebuilt settups, premade open source software, etc. for driving these LCDs. I know you want to make your own, but you can use alot of these guides as a jumping off point.

Here's a thread from a major computer hardware forum addressing the subject, including lots of good links on premade software, LCDs, etc: **broken link removed**

 

[evandude]

I don't know about you but there is NO way we would get away with that as a senior project here (electrical engineering, UMaine)

they won't let us do anything where the "meat" of the project involves any significant programming (ie- has to be MOSTLY hardware)

LCD interfacing should be extremely easy... there are a TON of examples of parallel and serial interfacing... I myself have made a serial LCD controller based on a PIC that accepts typical commands and ascii text. basically its a clone of the serial LCDs out there (ie- matrix orbital, crystalfontz)

but i must say that although it took me a little head-scratching, the amount of work i did (and the final complexity) are nowhere near to warranting a senior project... there would still be some difficulty in writing the PC side of it, but that is even FURTHER outside the realm of electrical engineering and I really don't think they'd appreciate a project where 80% of your work was in writing windows software for a EE.

just my .02

 

[Optikon]

I don't know about you but there is NO way we would get away with that as a senior project here (electrical engineering, UMaine)

they won't let us do anything where the "meat" of the project involves any significant programming (ie- has to be MOSTLY hardware)

LCD interfacing should be extremely easy... there are a TON of examples of parallel and serial interfacing... I myself have made a serial LCD controller based on a PIC that accepts typical commands and ascii text. basically its a clone of the serial LCDs out there (ie- matrix orbital, crystalfontz)

but i must say that although it took me a little head-scratching, the amount of work i did (and the final complexity) are nowhere near to warranting a senior project... there would still be some difficulty in writing the PC side of it, but that is even FURTHER outside the realm of electrical engineering and I really don't think they'd appreciate a project where 80% of your work was in writing windows software for a EE.

just my .02

I tend to agree... maybe if you put "enough" hardware content in the project, the software end will become a minority.

Consider in addition to programmable messages, also why not throw in some useful information such as ambient temperature inside the case with an alarm, noise level of PS fans, record run time of PC etc etc...

This way, your design work will mostly be sensor interface, analog & digital and as a convenience you can provide an LCD (microcontroller) to display the vital data.

 

[Rogue5]

yeah, my main concern is my advisor feeling that it is too much programming and not enough hardware stuff, I plan on asking him sometime in the next couple days, so that may end my party real quickly.
I did plan on trying to have case temps and fan speeds and such, but I wanted to drift more towards the visual designs direction, since there are plenty of LCD setups you can buy that do temps and fan speeds.
Another idea I had been toying with was some sound activated aspects.

Thanks for the link plot.