LCD plugin supporting more than 70 display types (now with full graphics support!!!) (1 Viewer)

[wunschkind]

@ tkortell: thank you very much for your answer.

i ordered a t6963c LCD now . you say that the graphical possibilities are not ready yet for this displays.. but can i use it without them?

it would be great if joe could make it usable.


have a nice day



wunschind

 

[livan74]

Graphic display with T6963C DOENS'T WORK!
I have one 240 x 64 display that works great with all other software, with this it doesn't work even if it's supported by the plugin.....

 

[knutinh]

can anyone recommend a VFD + controller combo with bigger letters than iMon VFD, that can be plugged and played into this driver?

I have a hard time reading the display from my couch, but there is lots of room in the case. 2x40 or 4x20 letter displays with large, high-contrast letters would be great.

Who sells these, and what should it cost?

regards
Knut

 

[wunschkind]

hi,

i bought a t6963c display (240x128) and it works in mp but not the whole display is used. i thought that mp tries to display the time or music titles with bigger characters but it doesn´t. why? can i change it?


bye


wunschkind

 

[tkortell]

hi again wunschkind,

When you use a LCD display in character mode the sise and shape of the characters are fixed. No software can shange that. So if the charactes are fixed to 8x8 pixels thereis no use in getting a big display. You only get more rows and columns of charecters. So what I'm saying is that if you want biger lethers you need a display that uses more pixels for the characters.

If it would be posible to use the display in graphical mode we could get how big lethers we want because then it uses all awailable pixels in the display to create a picture.

By defauld MediaPortal only uses 2 rows but it is posible to use them all. Here is a PM I got from JoeDalton on how to use more rows:

The plugin supports an unlimited number of rows, but there is no UI (yet) to change what should be displayed on what lines.

If you browse through the ExternalDisplay thread, there is some information on how to add support for more lines.

In short, you need to edit the ExternalDisplay.xml file.
It has a number of Message nodes in it. Each message node represents the display when MP has a certain status and a certain window is active.

Each Message node contains a number of Line nodes. Each line node represents a display line. The first line node represents the first display line, etc...

So if you add extra Line nodes in a Message node the plugin will use an extra line. To figure out what a line node can contain, check the lines that are already there...

The #date property gives you the current date.

If you turn the PropertyBrowser on in my plugin setup, you get a list of all properties that are available in MP. This is a dynamic list, this means the list grows while working in MP...

Joe

I could send you a ExternalDisplay.xml file that I made that uses more rows on the display if you want.

Regards / Tomas

 

[wunschkind]

hi tkortell,

and thank you very much ... it would be great if you could send me your .xml. i´ll try it. (i´ll send you my email through a PM)

yesterday i was really depressed and looked for some other solutions at ebay. i think i´ll try a TFT display (7´´) but i have too earn some money yet.

ok have a nice day ...


wunschkind

 

[maXe72]

Thanks for this great Plugin, Joe ! Without this one, I still would use TVCentral instead of Media-Portal

Anyway, is there a workaround for the LCD failure after the wakeup from Hibernate-Mode ?

With TVC is used LCD-Hype for controlling my LCD.
Before i send the PC to hibernate, i started a script, which stopped LCD Hype.
To start LCD-Hype afther wakeup, there was another script running every Minute. This one checked for the LCD-Hype Task and started it, if it was necessary.

But i dont know how to handel this Prob with Media-Portal

 

[JoeDalton]

I'm back :!: I've allowed myself some extended vacation to find some new strength, and it seemed to help...

Now, to reward you all for the long wait, I've added a long requested feature: you can now display the value of any windows performance counter (CPU & Memory usage, etc...) on your LCD/VFD.

For this I added a new node you can use in your externaldisplay.xml file: PerformanceCounter. It has 4 parameters, of wich the first 3 are mandatory:

• CategoryName: the name of the performance counter category
  CounterName: the name of the performance counter
  InstanceName: the name of the instance to show the counter for
  Format: the formatting to apply to the performance counter value

To find out what performance counters are available to you, start the Winows Performance Monitor (Performance option in the Administrative Tools in Control Panel) and add a new Performance counter. The screen you are now getting lists all available performance counters.
The "Performance Object" combobox corresponds to the Category.
The Counters are in the lower left listbox, the Instances in the lower right listbox.

The following example shows the CPU usage when MP is idle. (Maybe not very useful, but it serves the purpose :wink: )

  <Message Status="Idle">
    <Line Alignment="Centered">
      <Text Value="MediaPortal" />
    </Line>
    <Line Alignment="Centered">
      <Parse Value="#time " />
      <PerformanceCounter CategoryName="Processor" CounterName="% Processor Time" InstanceName="_Total" Format="##0"/>
      <Text Value="% CPU"/>
    </Line>
  </Message>

Now, don't get too carried away requesting new features or new drivers! I still have enough on my todo list for a couple of months. Moreover, I decided to take it a bit easier this time and I think it's better slow than not at all...

As always: all help is welcome, so if you're interested in helping me maintaining this plugin (either developing, testing, writing documentation, doing research, prototyping a UI for editing the externaldisplay.xml file, ...) send me a personal message. Any help is appreciated!

Joe

 

[NLS]

good job man

 

[zion22]

For reference; The KS0066U LCD chip is afaik 100% HD44780 compatible, hence those LCD's work by setting the external display to "HD44780 or compatible".

My "test" LCD project

Thanks for a well done plugin.