I had a “Chromalyte” LCD screen that came from EIO.\u00a0 I needed some sort of cable for another thing going on at home and EIO came up having it in some google search.\u00a0 It was cheap and the price for a similar cable from darn near anywhere else on the planet was about 5 times higher plus obscene shipping on top of that for something that ultimately ends up in a padded envelope and has $2 of postage on it.\u00a0 Anyway this LCD was supposed to do 20 characters by 4 lines.\u00a0 Currently I’ve been using a 20 by 2 lines LCD by Newhaven.\u00a0 The Newhaven works great.\u00a0 The Chromalyte?\u00a0 Not so much.<\/p>\n
I googled Chromalyte looking for a data sheet and figuring there may be some info somewhere on the internet about it and maybe using it on an Arduino project or something like that.\u00a0 I noticed I kept finding pages for EIO.\u00a0 I looked the product over and kept trying to find some sort of marking on it.\u00a0 I looked at the data sheet found on EIO and it was pretty basic.<\/p>\n
It mentioned using some sort of software available for download from Chromalyte’s website to test it from your Windows PC.\u00a0 I figured maybe I could try that and tried harder looking for some sort of Chromalyte website.\u00a0 I threw Incorporated into the search and still kept coming up with EIO.\u00a0 I really started to wonder at this point and went to Archive.org looking for historical websites that were named Chromalyte.\u00a0 What I discovered?\u00a0 EVEN YEARS AGO Chromalyte dot com pointed to EIO’s sales pages.\u00a0 Today?\u00a0 It’s current contents?\u00a0 It’s a GoDaddy “is this your website” listing.\u00a0 But with the history seeming to always be EIO they don’t even seem to be a real company and are instead just a propped up brand name for EIO.<\/p>\n
What made me look into Chromalyte so much that I was having problems with?\u00a0 Newhaven LCD I can serial.print and serial.write decimal or hex codes to it all day long…. move the cursor around on the screen, clear the screen, put text anywhere etc.\u00a0 Chromalyte? I print serial to it and nothing happens.\u00a0 I throw in slash n and r to see if that helps and it doesn’t.\u00a0 I try sending hex codes for all sorts of thing and nothing.\u00a0 If I serial.write a clear screen it wipes the screen.\u00a0 If I serial write movement commands and turn on the cursor I can watch the cursor dance around all over the screen.\u00a0 I print more serial to it and nothing happens.\u00a0 I serial.println to it? I get a white box IN FRONT OF the text and the line that I want anywhere I tell it to move the cursor to.<\/p>\n
Is there anything about this in the data sheet?\u00a0 Nope.\u00a0 Anyone used one on an Arduino?\u00a0 Not that I can find…. Heck if it wasn’t for EIO listings all over the place I don’t think anything comes back about Chromalyte at all.\u00a0 I’d have to format some search keywords to force it to drop out EIO responses just to see if I could find anything else because when I searched for that name every entry for pages and pages came back as EIO.<\/p>\n
The codes it uses are really bizarre compared to most other LCD brands available.\u00a0 I think I found someone’s code ONCE that actually used a similar command structure for clearing the screen and moving the cursor but all of the other codes were different.\u00a0 I’m not a stranger to writing to serial driven LCD as well as using parallel, SPI, and I2C to write to text and graphic LCDs.\u00a0 This thing is just plain weird.<\/p>\n
Sure I could probably email EIO and bitch about it but if this thing is this weird it’s just not worth it to me.\u00a0 It was cheap enough compared to the hundreds and hundreds of dollars I’ve spent on all the other hardware to build a coffee roaster that it’s but a blip.\u00a0 I just don’t see myself buying another one, ever.<\/p>\n
If anyone out there can send me an Arduino program that DOES indeed work on a Chromalyte labeled as a c420a that simply clears the screen, writes Line 1 to line 1, Line 2 to line 2 and so on I’ll be amazed.\u00a0 If such a thing does occur I’ll permanently install the screen in a project I’ll be doing later to read a flow meter and open\/close a water valve on my reverse osmosis water system so that I can punch up a 1\/2\/5 gallon fill without needing to watch it.\u00a0 I’m hoping to have it monitor my total water into the system and the output into a bottle and then monitor TDS sensors to gauge water purity.\u00a0 Then have it alert me to change the filters and keep track of water input purity throughout the year.<\/p>\n
To my girlfriend:\u00a0 Yes I am too lazy to set a timer to track how long I’ve been adding water to a water bottle.\u00a0 Instead I will design a circuit, solder up a board, write software for a microcontroller, and then mount the thing in a case so that I don’t have to set a timer so I don’t overflow the water bottle.\u00a0 I know my limitations.\u00a0 Building a system to turn the water off by itself is FAR easier for me to do.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
So anyway today arrived a Newhaven NHD-0420D3Z-NSW-BBW as well as a pair of PCB solderable DB25 connectors, a bag of 100 B3F-1000 type Omron buttons and a few Maxim MAX31855 thermocouple ADC chips.\u00a0 I figure I’ll make a board up that does 4 inputs at some point so I got enough to do that plus a couple spares.\u00a0 I still need the sockets though.\u00a0 Nobody seems to sell those except for Ryan McLaughlin.\u00a0 After the MAX31855 that he switched to from the MAX6675 became scarce he shut down his store.\u00a0 Hopefully he will pop back up sometime soon since his boards were really well made and I think he’d be a great resource for DIY’ers building smoker controllers and coffee roasters and other such things.<\/p>\n
Anyway this weekend I will be doing my taxes and then spending the rest of time soldering pins to the Newhaven display and connecting it to the roaster controller.\u00a0 This past two weeks I converted the entire roaster program over to Arduino 1.0 and updated all of the Libraries that I was using to the latest versions.\u00a0 I few I had to modify slightly due to them not being 1.0 updated but the majority of them were available on the internet updated already.<\/p>\n
The conversion to 1.0 made me make a note of all of the libraries I had used and begin to create a list.\u00a0 If you look at the menu bar you will see “Resources” up top.\u00a0 This allows you to pick an Arduino link and then get links that go to sites to download the current libraries if you are looking to build your own project.\u00a0 I’ll be adding a few more projects and libraries that seem useful to DIY Coffee Roasters (and controllers) over the coming weeks too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I had a “Chromalyte” LCD screen that came from EIO.\u00a0 I needed some sort of cable for another thing going on at home and EIO came up having it in some google search.\u00a0 It was cheap and the price for a similar cable from darn near anywhere else on the planet was about 5 times higher plus obscene shipping on top of that for something that ultimately ends up in a padded envelope and has $2 of postage on it.\u00a0 Anyway this LCD was supposed to do 20 characters by 4 lines.\u00a0 Currently I’ve been using a 20 by 2 \u2026 Continue reading