We’re using this screen: http://www.qualitymobilevideo.com/lcd4l.aspx
It’s a bit low contrast and the pixels are chunky. But it’s small, thin and light. And cheap! The image on the screen is being fed via composite signal from that black blob to the lower right of the photo. The one with the red paint smear on it. It’s not a pinhole camera, but it has such a small lens that it behaves a lot like one. Both of them run together on a pack of eight AA batteries.
Look at that pretty thing! I got it from our School Store over at NYC Resistor. It’s a four bit parallel LCD display, white on blue. Werry naice!
Right now it’s just serving as a data readout. Ultimately it will be used as the tweaking interface for the puppet suit, so that in the field we can avoid having to use a computer to make small changes. We’ll be using the onboard EEPROM on the AVR to store those changes.
The unit is the ARDUINO LCD-shield V1.1 from nuelectronics.com.
here’s a simplified version of the code I used:
#include <LiquidCrystal.h> //include the library that does all the heavy lifting
LiquidCrystal lcd(12, 11, 5, 4, 3, 2); // initialize the library with the numbers of the interface pins
lcd.begin(16, 2); // set up the LCD's number of rows and columns:
lcd.setCursor(0, 1); //put the cursor where we want it
lcd.print("I'd rather get a bike!!!"); // Print a message to the LCD
That’s it!
