On Sat, Nov 19, 2011 at 5:48 PM, Mohan Sundaram <mohan.tux at gmail.com> wrote:
For the hardware, look at CrystalFontz.com. I agree these are
expensive. I've integrated these for headless machines in 2001. These
used to come at $60-100 then.
I work with LCD displays now. We can get displays at a price points of
under $10 for 20x2 and 16x2 displays. Most of these controllers come
with SPI and UART interfaces. Look up http://www.trulydisplays.com or
http:/www.everbouquet.co.tw.
In the US, there is a DIY electronics site called Sparkfun
http://www.sparkfun.com and in India, we should get some such from EFY
site powered by element14.
It would be a good thing to take cheap displays, make a USB to SPI
convertor board, a bay mountable fixture possibly with buttons.
Overall cost budget should be pegged at $12-13 which is achievable.
Typical components and prices are LDO $1.5 ( 5V to 3.3V), a
microcontroller with a USB device (PIC or MSP $1.5) and board would
cost approx $1 with passives.
A nice little project for a EC or EEE student who is interested in
We may need a library to be written to provide high level functions to
be able to write formatted text etc or interface this to lcdproc.
I've a hardware company that will work on this hardware for a smallGreat! I will get in touch with you off-list...
payment, if someone can sponsor this. If someone can anchor the
software on the PC side, define the APIs to be implemented in
hardware, we could have a reasonable thing going.