Questions on my new 16x2 Crystalfontz LCD display

Let's Make Robots
1

This is mostly directed at voodoobot, because he has one of these same LCDs (sorry!) :D

However, most serial 16x2 LCDs are pretty much interchangeable... so anyone can help out here. I'm looking at the PDF datasheet here-

http://www.halted.com/objects/catalog/product/extras/23006_CrystalFontz_CFA632_v2.0[1].pdf

(and while you are at it, check out HSC- http://www.halted.com/ Its a great surplus electronics store in California, so yeah. You can drop by them on Ryder Street in Santa Clara, or in Rohnert Park. There's another in Sunnyvale I think...)

So anyways, I was wondering how to have it display something with a picaxe. I think it should go kind of like this-

serout 1, N2400, (003)

or maybe like this-

serout 1, N2400, ("Hello")

I've looked over the documentation pretty thoroughly, but I'm new to the whole LCD business and I would really appreciate the help if you someone could give me some sample code to work with. And just so you know, I've closed JPE like it says to, and I've soldered contacts to Ground, LCD V, and Data In since I'm only going to be working with serial. And I've seen the BS2 code, but so far my attempts at converting it to PICAXE style BASIC are unsuccessful. I did manage to get a bunch of unreadable characters on the screen, but thats it.

Thankyouthankyouthankyou!!!!

2

The Picaxe Manual section 3

The Picaxe Manual section 3 has a whole area starting on page 30 about interfacing to LCDs. It even includes code samples.

http://www.rev-ed.co.uk/docs/picaxe_manual3.pdf

Does this help?

3

thanks

Thanks for being the only one to answer! However, I’ve already looked through that section and it didn’t really help except to tell me to get the baud rates straight. But I did figure it out! For some reason it:

1) Never worked properly when I gave it a real baud rate value (N2400_8 with SETFREQ EM8 at the beginning of the code)

2) Only worked when:

a) I flipped both of these little tiny switches that I found out the documentation only covered with this one sentence: (I had to search for it)

HOST COMMUNICATIONS

The CFA-632 communicates with its host using an RS-232 interface. The baud rate is set with the DIP switches on the

back of the display. Please refer to the legend silk-screened on the back of the module for the settings.

b) Also gave it an value that technically shouldn’t work (2400 or 9200 or 1900)

But still, thanks!

4

LOL! Glad you found it. The
LOL! Glad you found it. The first rule of troubleshooting is: check the physical layer. ; j