Friday 17 February 2012

Heroic Failures #1

This is the first in a (hopefully short) series of posts describing things which seemed possible beforehand but which turned out unsatisfactorily. It is inspired by a quote from Fred Brooks (via Nat) "Good judgement is the result of experience ... Experience is the result of bad judgement."

The initial motivation was dissatisfaction with the fact that all current (to my knowledge) lcdproc displays must be tethered to their host by either USB or Serial and that they might be much more useful if they could be positioned where they were needed.  When this was coupled to the observation that XBees are pretty smart and have lots of I/O, it seemed that driving a 4-line LCD display directly from an XBee using a couple of AA batteries might be a runner. The circuit is shown below and shows the display being driven in 4-bit mode with a couple of extra lines for EN and RS (I could only find a Series-1 Eagle part and used a Series-2 XBee so some of the pin names are a bit off).


One hacked lcdproc driver and some low-level XBee and LCD C-programming later, it worked... but only just!
  • The display wouldn't work properly with 3.3v: it required 5v and hence another regulator for the XBee, e.g., an Explorer Regulated breakout board,
  • It also wouldn't work (for very long anyway) on batteries: when its backlight was on, the display drew 150mA,
  • Maintaining an out-of-tree driver (for lcdproc) is painful,
  • It is extremely slow (about 1 char/sec). This is because each bit is framed in an XBee packet (thus requiring ~100 bytes to get one character to the display).