Quote:
Originally Posted by magical hands
Hey Dave thanks for the message. Just to clear up, I want to use this LCD for OI so the drivers can view the heading angle of the robot etc. So, how can I connect? Like its not clear. Using the adapter which sparkfun has already attached to LCD there are only 3 holes I see, 1) 5V 2) GND 3) RX. I have looked at many codes infact kevin has written one as well but what I understand so far is that these codes are written so that the LCD can be mounted onto the robot not on Operator Interface. Please let me know Dave if I misunderstood something. I really appreciate your input.
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It looks like many of the other responses you are getting in this thread may have missed your desire to have this on the Operator Interface.
As Mark corrected pointed out, the 'backpack' will need something in between the dashboard port and the backpack's serial port.
Also keep in mind that the 'dashboard' port has RS-232 levels on it, whereas the backpack is expecting a TTL level signal.
The Backpack uses a PIC16 CPU that is FLASH based, and the programming header at JC1 could be used to reprogram the PIC with your own custom software. This would allow the display to work directly from the dashboard data, but for that you not only need to write the display drivers (which I've already provided pointers to) but also the serial port parsing code to interpret the dashboard data and turn it into something meaningful on your display.
You will also need an in-circuit programmer. Microchip's ICD2 is about $160, but if you search around you'll find clones for less and information on how to homebrew them.
The PIC16F688 only has 7K of program memory, which might be a little small if you want to write the new program in "C", so unless you can avoid doing anything that requires one of the "C" libraries to be linked in, you might end up needing to write the new program in assembler.
Writing new code would be the cleanest way to do it, but certainly inserting a small microcontroller with two serial ports in series would be another way to do it.