2009-11-03
LCDProc and the PCIDEA 20×4 LCD display
A couple of weeks ago, I got it into my head that the death of Blinkenlights was a bad thing. My primary PC already has a little LCD on the keyboard (I got a deal on a first-generation Logitech G15 gaming keyboard… not just useful for gamers) and, combined with LCDProc, it makes a great diagnostic display for figuring out why your newest creation is freezing up the GUI before you kill it.
…so I went on eBay and ordered an inexpensive Chinese LCD display for my experimentation machine. The PCIDEA 20×4 USB drive-bay LCD. As the manufacturer claims, it IS fully compatible with the CrystalFontz driver in LCDProc… but they neglect to tell you which of the three CrystalFontz drivers to use and how to configure it. Here is your answer in the form of an LCDd.conf snippet:
The key elements which aren’t default and aren’t immediately obvious to the layperson seem to be the use of the CFontzPacket driver, Model=631, /dev/ttyUSB0, and a 19200 bitrate.
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