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Ham Radio

Old LCD panels

[Today’s run: Limerock Road, 4 miles]

I’ve been letting my GPSDO measuring go on for about 3 weeks now.  And The BeagleBone/weather station thing is running along.  So I took a little break and dug out something I have had on the shelf for about 3 years.

I was at a hamfest in Ft. Collins, Colorado, probably 3-4 years ago, and I bought two small LCD panels.  They are marked G121CB1P00.  Turns out that there is information about these on the internet.  I was able to find the datasheet and how to program them.  They are pretty old technology and probably not fooling around with very much.

But fooling around is what I do.

So I was looking at them and wondering what it would take to make them go.  I really like this BeagleBone thing, being able to write shell scripts or perl scripts to do pin-by-pin I/O.  But the BeagleBone uses lower voltage for GPIO operations and this LCD needs 12 lines with 5 volt logic.  That would be kind of a pain.  I do have some small PIC processors that would do the job.  But then I have to figure out how to write a PIC program and get the thing programmed up.  I don’t know if I am that ambitious just to see the LCD light up.