Wild Thumper Controller Board

Community General Discussions
1

I bought a Wild Thumper Controller Board a few years back for a robot project that I never got around to building.  Since I never got around to that project I would like to put the controller board to good use as a battery charger. I was wondering if someone could help me wire a SparkFun Serial LCD to it.  How do I use the spare IO pins if they're setup for servos?

 

2

I would think you could

I would think you could probably use the Arduino software serial library to repurpose one of those servo pins as a serial transmit. I’d recommend connecting the LCD via GND->GND, and RX->pin D12 on your wild thumper controller (also give 5v to the LCD of course). You won’t need a software serial RX pin, but you’ll have to specify something in the setup of the software serial port. I’ll assume you might just use D10 for that. So, you might have this in your Arduino code to include the library:

#include <SoftwareSerial.h>

And this in the setup function:

SoftwareSerial lcd(10, 12);

lcd.begin(9600);

And this elsewhere in your code to send a message out:

lcd.println(“hello world”);

 

3

Thanks for the tip
Thanks for the tip hoggernick. I will get it a try tomorrow.

4

Ok, it’s not working for me.

Ok, it’s not working for me. I uploaded a basic serial LCD sketch setting rx= 12 and tx=10 and it’s not working for me. 

SoftwareSerial mySerial(12,10); // pin 2 = TX, pin 3 = RX (unused)

void setup()

{

 mySerial.begin(9600); // set up serial port for 9600 baud

  delay(500); // wait for display to boot up

}

void loop()

{

  mySerial.write(254); // move cursor to beginning of first line

  mySerial.write(128);

  mySerial.write("                “); // clear display

  mySerial.write(”                ");

  mySerial.write(254); // move cursor to beginning of first line

  mySerial.write(128);

   mySerial.write(“Hello, world!”);

  while(1); // wait forever

}

5

After further investigating,

After further investigating, I discovered something is interferring with the SparkFun Serial Enabled LCD Backpack. I’m seeing seeing two rows of ASCII blocks.

From SparkFun’s website: “If you are seeing two rows of ASCII blocks █. it’s possible that you might have bricked the serial enabled LCD by putting it into an unknown state. This is a common problem if you are uploading code to the Arduino while another device is connected to the same hardware UART line (i.e. pin 0 and 1). This will cause the LCD to output random characters usually on the screen or not even show anything on the screen.”