[Approved] Display driver for vfd Futaba MDM166A in minidisplay plugin (3 Viewers)

[Datenschredder]

Sure, I will do so, hopefully this evening when being back at home.

I encapsuled the classes in one cs file because I feared that you MP developers would not like to have too many files in the minidisplay Project. But of course I will do it. I also believe, that you can base on These mdm166a documents. It is likely that it works the same way.

You probably should not use is my single line concept, because it is not so clever. I never programmed a display driver before and did not know how to handle a matrix easily and differ between 2 or more lines. So I investigated a little bit and made use of this concept for a single line solution, which also provides a font editor, which I use in the optional settings and which is a very nice thing to have...: http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/29461/Led-Font-Creator-with-Scrolling-Display

 

[Stéphane Lenclud]

More interresting stuff I think protocols between Futaba displays are quite different. At least they are between GP1212A01A and GP1212A02A.

 

[Datenschredder]

Not sure because I only programmed one Maybe I can learn from your code for your futaba model, how to implement 2 rows. As promised, please find attached the description I used to program the futabacom class.

 

[Stéphane Lenclud]

It's a graphic display so you just send your pixels. It's up to you to compose an image with two lines of characters. My code is published at http://hg.slions.net .
You want to look at MiniDisplay which build a DLL and SharpMiniDisplay which provides a very basic UI from which you can drive your display.
Those are very early draft though. For now I only support GP1212A01A.
The DLL is C++ and does the HID connection and implements the protocol.
The C# application renders the display in a container and sends it to the device.
The idea is to implement a client server solution much like SoundGraph did for iMON so that multiple applications can publish informations on your display.
It's still very early work but you could reuse some of those concept to implement multi-line in you MP driver.
I'll try support that MDM166A eventually but don't hold your breath.

 

[Stéphane Lenclud]

How did you fit your display in your housing? Did you use some kind of filters? Could you provide pictures?

 

[Stéphane Lenclud]

I asked Futaba for that MDM166A datasheet which they kindly promptly provided. See attached document.

 

[Stéphane Lenclud]

That's a funny little device. It does not even have a back buffer so refresh is possibly visible though the whole VRAM is just 192 bytes which is less than a 10th of my GP1212As so I guess you don't get to notice much tearing.
Interestingly one can control the dimming of the volume indicator individually. I which one could do that per pixels for the GP1212As

 

[uxDesign]

I'm trying to compile the MinidisplayLibrary but there are some interface changes. I will post the dll when I've fixed the issues.

 

[Stéphane Lenclud]

I'm trying to compile the MinidisplayLibrary but there are some interface changes.

Indeed, minor ones though.

I will post the dll when I've fixed the issues.

I thought @Datenschredder was working on it himself...

 

[uxDesign]

The MinidisplayLibrary .dll work fine with 1.8. Dll and sources attached. I'm not familiar with git. Can somebody check in the files?