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fovea1959
12-02-2014, 23:43
I recall seeing (last 2 years) that someone was marketing a nicely packaged "on robot" LCD display that connected pretty simply to the cRIO (serial, I2C, or SPI). An hour's Googling tonight has not dug it up.


Can anyone give any pointers on where to find such a beast? My recollection was that was reasonably priced ($50-$75)...
mman1506
12-02-2014, 23:49
I think it was the insight http://www.bitbuilttech.com/

I can't seem to find it on AM's site.
fovea1959
13-02-2014, 00:09
thanks. That was the exact item!

darnit if it's ain't available. In that case, looks like an offseason Arduino project (though the USB port on a RoboRIO may make this type of thing easier...)
Joe Ross
13-02-2014, 00:34
We used a CrystalFontz CFA634 last year (until we needed extra weight for something else). It costs around $50, but we had one lying around.

We used it with SPI, which worked great (after we implemented SPI in java). Now that SPI has been included in the library, it should be easier to get started.
fovea1959
13-02-2014, 11:34
Joe: thanks for the recommendation. Was starting to head towards a roll-your-own (and we have an Arduino onboard already, which is helpful for such things, except our cRIO->Arduino interface is a 3 wide parallel).

Was willing to pay for something that was already cased and cabled, but this is why we have a 3d printer and lots of kids that like to solder.
Joe Ross
13-02-2014, 11:54
Here is the class we used. It has been refactored to compile with the new SPI library, but has not been tested with the new library.
fovea1959
13-02-2014, 13:15
Joe: we haven't done any SPI yet, only a little custom I2C for 345 acceleromters. The displays are available for both SPI and I2C (and USB, and parallel, and serial...)

In your experience, would there be a strong reason to prefer either I2C or SPI for a new setup?
fovea1959
14-02-2014, 11:21
Joe, didn't see the source code post yesterday. Thanks!
Joe Ross
14-02-2014, 11:51
I'm not sure that I2C, SPI, or serial get much testing in the FRC environment. I would probably lean towards serial as being easier to debug, unless you were using it at high utilization (http://forums.usfirst.org/showthread.php?21296-SerialPort-exception-at-high-receive-data-rates).

I2C has less wires and is easier to expand then SPI.