RPi Tutorial EGHS:Alpha-Numeric Display

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GPIO Hardware & Software Tutorials:

• GPIO Protection Circuits
• Basic Circuits: LED output - DC motor - Switch Input - Analogue Sensor
• Intermediate Circuits: Shift Registers - Analogue to Digital - Driving Circuit - Alpha-Numeric Display
• Advanced Circuits: Control Hardware Over The Internet

This page is part of a work in progress.

Warnings

While most of these circuits may interface directly to the RPi, the use of a buffered interface (such as the one supplied by the Gertboard) is recommended which will help protect against damage. Alternatively, experiment with one of the Alternative Test Platforms.

Extreme caution should be exercised when interfacing hardware at a low level, you may damage your RPi, your equipment and potentially yourself and others. Doing so is at your own risk!

Aims

This tutorial is closely based on the excellent work done by Gaurav Chaudhary, on his blog 16x2 Char LCD with TI MSP430 Launch Pad.

The purpose of this tutorial will be to adapt the setup for use with the RPi, and to further develop the code for easier interfacing.

In addition to this, the tutorial will adapt the follow-up post 16x2 Serial LCD (Two Wire) with PIC12F675 for use with TI MSP430 Launch Pad and ultimately the RPi.

This would provide a useful standard for connecting an LCD display to the RPi using up just 2 GPIO pins, allowing easy debugging even for a setup which otherwise does not use a display.

Clearly there is no sense in replicating everything here, so the tutorial will focus mainly on the second part and also (when possible) how to translate this onto the RPi.

It is recommended, that you take the time to read through the above blog posts and if interested, I recommend looking through the rest of Gaurav Chaudhary's posts.

Note:
Until RPi devices are available, I can not confirm this will work on a real RPi.
For now, I shall be using the TI LaunchPad (see  Alternative Test Platforms
for details) to test the hardware on (as it is cheap and the logic levels similar).

The Software

While the RPi is not available, I can only confirm the TI LaunchPad code works for me.

TI LaunchPad

Sample test code for LCD Test Module (tested on TI MSP430G2553 device).

Code: