NOW IN STOCK – Analog panel meter [50uA] – Analog panel meters are not a blingy as LEDs but they add a touch of elegance and are easier to read quickly. This one is fairly large and is easy to open up the front with two screws and replace the gauge. There’s a ‘zero adjust’ as well. The back has four 3mm (4-40) screws, 6.5cm apart, so its easy to attach to a box or enclosure
Size: 3.125″ (8 cm) square, 1.25″ thick (the panel is 0.5″, the coil sticks out another 0.75″)
Measures: This panel is 0-50uA which means it can be used with any kind of power supply!
To use with a digital output microcontroller (such as an Arduino or AVR), connect the black wire to ground, a resistor in series with the red wire and the other side of the resistor to a PWM output. Then sweep the output from 0 to 100% PWM to swing the meter. The resistor should be = (Power supply Voltage) * 20,000. So for a 5V supply, 100Kohm. For a 3.3V supply, 66Kohm.
IN STOCK – MONOCHRON KS0108 Graphic LCD. A big, bold, beautiful, black LCD with white back-lit pixels. This LCD is the graphical upgrade to those popular 16×2 LCDs, but allows full graphical control. This LCD is used in the MONOCHRON kit, we had to custom order these to get the black color so they are more expensive than the more common blue & white ones.
Black background with 128 x 64 ‘monochrome’ white pixels
Low power white LED back-light
The LCD is driven by on-board 5V parallel interface chipset KS0108 and KS0107. They are extremely common and well documented
This mini-tutorial will go through the process of setting up a ST7565 LCD. These LCDs are graphical which means they can display pixels, not just text. This type of LCD in particular has 128×64 pixels, which appear dark gray on a green-blue background. They have a backlight but can also be used without the light on for daytime visibility (Instructable docs are up!)…
This graphical display looks great, costs less! The dark gray pixels are visible in daylight, and there’s also a white LED backlight, which turns light bluish-green when on.
Four mounting holes and a blank 9 pin 2mm-pitch labeled breakout on the side – we just soldered some wire to each hole as shown in the photos, very easy! (The LCDs have no wires soldered in when we ship them)
Bonus!
We’re including a free 4050 level shifter chip so that you can safely use it with your favorite 5V microcontroller
Advantages!
Lower cost than KS0108 LCDs
Serial interface uses only 4 or 5 digital pins
Low power LED backlight
Visible in daylight / without backlight
Works perfectly with 3V logic
Challenges!…
3.3v power and logic means a level converter is needed for 5V Arduinos (we include this part when purchasing from us)
Microcontroller must buffer display – uses 1Kb of RAM. This means you must upgrade to a ATmega328 if you are using an Arduino with a ‘8 or ‘168
McGrew, 35, and Northrup, 32, are a husband-and-wife design team who have completed projects for Wikipedia, Clif Bar, and Timbuk2, and recently collaborated with open-source hardware designers Evil Mad Science to create interactive LED-infused coffee tables.
McGrew: “We have three tables — the Wave, the Ripple, and the Pulse — with the same lighting on the inside. They see change and light up in response. If you set something down on it, it lights up, but then calms down and stops twinkling. When you move that item, it will light back up again.”
Northrup: “We wanted to showcase two different ways you can use light. The Wave typically has a glass top, so you’re seeing everything — the circuit board, the LEDs, the patterns they’re making. The Ripple and the Pulse are more of a secret because they have this frosted top that just looks like a really nice table. When you interact with one of them, it becomes more than a table. You get this second, wonderful experience.”
McGrew: “The two big problems LEDs have always had — they weren’t very bright and were very expensive — are going away. We’re leveraging whatever we can get our hands on to help us make cool stuff.”
I ordered a fine graphic LCD from the adafruit store and decided to write a little graphics Menorah to learn how it works. I am not a programmer, and am new to micro-controllers so I learned a lot in the following sketch.
Some of the topics I included are:
Creating functions
drawing graphics with GLCD (I did it by hand for fun, but I assume the bitmap works as well or better)
Text placement in GLCD
debouncing (this doesn’t actually work in the following sketch. If you know why, drop a comment
abstraction (an array determines what order the flames are lit in so you can change it up)
A non-blocking timer. Using delay(); made my button detection icky. I decided to try and find a different way. I’m actually pretty happy with how this part worked out. suggestions on improving efficiency will be appreciated. I found a library in arduino.cc called fuse I think. I could never get the page to load, though so I couldn’t use it.
Lastly, I made this for my wife, and I know next to nothing about the Menorah. Please trust that it was done out of respect and that any mispellings, or cultural gaffes are based on my ignorance alone. Feel free to post corrections in this regard as well.
For more information, check out the LCD datasheet (marginally useful) or the HD4470 datasheet with useful stuff like the character map. To use with an Arduino, we suggest using our library (see below). This one is faster, more complete, uses 1 less pin and is works with more LCDs.
To use, connect pin 1 (GND) to ground, pin 2 (VDD) to +5V, pin 3 (Vo) to the middle of the pot, pin 4 (RS) to Arduino pin 7, pin 5 (RW) to ground, pin 6 (E) to Arduino pin 8, leave pins 7-10 disconnected, pin 11 thru 14 (DB4-DB7) to Arduino pins 9 thru 12, pin 15 (BL+) to +5V and pin 16 (BL-) to ground. See For a detailed photo if you’re having difficulty (the pinout is the same for 16×2 and 20×4 LCDs)
If you’re not using Arduino 17+, then delete the old LiquidCrystal library in Arduino/hardware/libraries and in its place copy the updated LiquidCrystal library. Now in the IDE select the LiquidCrystal->HelloWorld example sketch to try it out! (You may need to adjust the contrast pot.) For a detailed guide on using the LCD, check out the the Arduino LiquidCrystal Reference and LiquidCrystal Tutorial
The LiquidCrystal library allows you to control LCD displays that are compatible with the Hitachi HD44780 driver. There are many of them out there, and you can usually tell them by the 16-pin interface.
The Liquid Font Family is a collection of small bitmap fonts to be used on small displays, e.g. LCD displays on HTPCs, mp3-players, status displays on phones, printers, remote controls, etc.etc.
The overall goal is to provide nice-looking, very readable fonts that allow displaying a lot of information. So in contrast to most other bitmap font projects for tiny fonts, Liquid fonts are proportional fonts, not mono-spaced, because more characters can be displayed horizontally this way, and it also looks nicer. This means they require graphics capable displays. In particular, they are not primarily for 5×7 pixel LCDs, which have hardwired(=missing) horizontal and vertical empty pixel rows and columns to separate characters and lines.
The main work of the Liquid family is ‘Liquid Mean’. This font is a 6×8 pixel font which additionally focusses on good Unicode support. Currently, it already supports Latin, Greek and Cyrillic for a few hundred languages. It implements a superset of the European MES-2 standard, a recommendation for European Latin/Greek/Cyrillc fonts to support the vast majority of European languages, including most minor languages.
Liquid Mean goes beyond that. The support includes many more languages, even those which require a vast amount of accents and diacritic marks, like Ancient Greek, Vietnamese, and Mandarin Chinese Romanisation.
Liquid Mean explores what amazing things can be done on a very limited display with max. 6×8 pixels per character.
Printable catalog (PDF)
