2 Questions about OI
 

I have a couple of questions about the operator interface that I cant seem to find the answer to, and this seems to be a great place to get some help. SO:

1 - We are trying to use the LED output bits provided by the control ports - that is fine and dandy. The one thing that we can seem to find out is the power outputs from the ports (specifically the LED pins on ports 1 & 3). Does anyone have any info about the supplied voltage?

also 2- We are looking to use a set of matrixorbital 4x20 VFD displays to relay information back to our pilots (basically a custom version of the dashboard). One option is to program something like a Basic stamp to take output bits from the LEDs and convert them into pre-programed statements to appear on the VFDs. The other is to use the Mini controller to directly output realtime data to the displays by porting it to the OI (Im still not sure how it works, but my programming team seems to like the idea). So basically my question is 1. can we even use this concept (refering to rules and such) and 2. Which system would work better.

Thanks for your help.

Re: 2 Questions about OI
 

On the page of the OI manual that talks about those pins, it says that they provide 5V, and they are limited to 10mA.
<R66> discusses connecting devices to the Dashboard port. You can legally connect anything you want, but it has to be battery-powered, because AC power won't be available other than to power the OI.
I think a BASIC Stamp would be the better of the two options you've offered, but have you read the Dashboard packet specifications? It's a lot of data to process on something like a BASIC Stamp, and it seems like a lot of extra work for minimal gain. I would suggest using a laptop instead, if you have one available. This is explicitly allowed in <R66>, assuming once again that it is running on battery, and you'll have a much easier time processing the data.

Re: 2 Questions about OI
 

Ahh, something I know lots about. (finally..) I would go with a basic stamp or a PIC to send the signals to the LCD, especially if it is a parallel LCD, than that would be much faster.

You could use a basic stamp for that, but I feel that a basic stamp is just kind of restricting, I like to use PIC's directly, I like the control you get.

I like to use the 16F series of chips and program them with assembly language.
http://members.cox.net/sonjarob/TUTs/uP4Idiots.html is a good tutorial for micro assembly, with some examples. With as simple of a project as you are doing, the code should be really easy to come up with. You don't have to use a Matrix Orbital LCD, btw, just use a HD44780 compatable parallel LCD, and it is all pretty simple. If anyone is interested I can post or email some of the ASM I use to interface with LCD. Also if anyone wants help with the actual programming of the chip (getting the data on the chip, not writing the code) I can help with that too. I might be able to help out with simple ASM stuff but, I'm not exactly hot stuff at ASM, takes me a while to get it right.

I love using LCDs, they are simple to interface with, some of them can be relatively cheap, and they look a lot fancier than LEDs.