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.
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.