Back to basics: LCD Displays

hello once again fellow flight simmers and cockpit builders i'm back once again with a i'm gonna call it a back to basics uh video i know that there was still a couple of uh basic things that i have not talked about yet because as many of you know by now i got sidetracked big time you know a couple of months ago but you know somebody posted a question about lcd displays and i had never played around with him and you know once again you know the way that i'm gonna interpret this to you guys i got it to work you know this is the way i understand the website but as always i recommend that you guys visit both websites the simvim x and the real sim control so that you guys can always get the most up to date information and you know get the directions and everything directly from as they say the horse's mouth um that way if i happen to misinterpret something you know you guys can hopefully clear it up with what is actually written on the website okay so first things first when we come over to the website of course i am talking about the real sim control website um you basically in order to get this information you go to the output page here and then you have an area for lcds and this is where it talks about all this you know all the different types of lcd panels that or displays that it supports um and then you know so you basically go down and uh it looks like from what i gather from the website um the old method which is what i'm gonna show you to today how to connect an lcd display directly to the arduino um it seems like they are probably thinking about phasing that out and in the future you will have to use a controller lcd controller uno or nano but i'm not going to talk about that right now i'll do that in a separate video this is going to be only about connecting it directly to the arduino itself all right so read all this information please and if you notice way at the bottom they have the information for direct connection which are they're calling the old method so it is probably preferred that you use the uno board but for now this old method still works so i want to talk about a couple of things first so we're going to go over to my to my uh display area here and i'm gonna show you guys uh basically i have an lcd right here which is a 16 by two uh display and we're going to go over the different wiring things first of all i'm going to talk about the contrast so this image that i got off their website you can see that they have a potentiometer there for connecting the the contrast and it is very necessary to do this because if you don't you probably will not see anything so you'll probably either see uh totally blank the way it looks right now or if i move it to the other end uh you can see that you can see the all the blocks filled in but for some reason only the top row is filled in right now basically on the picture there you can see that you have on pin number one the very very left one that one goes to the ground the ground bus or the common line so what i've done is i have i have in here i have this black one right here that's going to my ground line and then i have this orange one going to the to the 5 volts and right now the 5 volts is coming out of the arduino it is recommended that because these panels do use a lot more power than than the um seven segment displays that you use a separate five volt line to to power these especially if you're going to be using a lot of them but for now jensen as i'm just using one of them right now i'm just getting my five volts directly from the arduino line here all right so so basically if you follow the the wire in there um i'm gonna try to see if i can point right here so the ground line you know goes directly to there and then you can also see way on this other end over on this side that you have another ground line so what i've done is i just basically put the ground line and i brought another black one here that's coming to the other end which is gonna be for the back light so i'm gonna kill two birds with one stone instead of taking two separate ground lines over here i'm just gonna join them together here and and then you can see that also the potentiometer that you can see here in the picture is also joined to the ground line so i just basically jumped off of here and brought it over to the potentiometer here and the same thing for the for the power the five volts right here are going to the other pin of the potentiometer and then i'm not sure if you can see it but way in the back there's this yellow line right here that's coming off the center pin of the little potentiometer and it's going to the pin where it's supposed to be at so obviously you can use any type of potentiometer that you want you know i'm using one of these very tiny little ones you know i got myself a package with i think it was like 10 of them for a few dollars i don't remember how much uh these are 10 kilo ohm potentiometers and they're tiny you know so you can put them pretty much anywhere but you can also use regular ones like this you know or the full size bigger ones like this or even sliding potentiometers like these you know but obviously for something like that you probably want something really really small you don't want you know big old potentiometers everywhere so that's what i'm using right here all right so now we're going to talk about the backlight so the backlight wiring is pretty much the same thing you know you're going to basically take uh the five volts put it into the ea pin on the lcd display which is the anode and then you're going to take the ground which is the cathode on the panel here and you're going to put it on the k and they're all labeled the same i've seen quite a few of them and they're all just labeled the same so that's what you're going to do with that now notice that he has a a resistor on the picture right here so if you don't put this is what it looks like right now if you don't put a resistor it is very very bright because it's getting basically the whole you know five volts with whatever current is drawing so you notice that i have a resistor right in here so if i change this five volts coming into it to the resistor over here you can see that it gets much dimmer you know so that's a it's a lot better but another good thing you can do is also you can use another potentiometer like if you want to add a potentiometer and bring all the wiring over here then you can adjust the brightness and you can adjust the contrast which is a preferred i think is a preferred way of doing it because sometimes you might want a little bit brighter and sometimes you might want it a little bit dimmer so in order to do that basically you're gonna take the five volts are gonna come directly to one of the pins on the arduino over here and then you're gonna take from the center pin of the potentiometer you're gonna bring that five volts back over here to the anode part and you're also gonna need um a ground so the ground also needs to be you know coming over to the to the potentiometer so i'll just get a ground from here and i'll bring it over here okay so now i got the potentiometer in line with everything i had i had put all the connections one pin too far to the left so it wasn't working so now i got that potentiometer so now you can see i can dim it all the way down and i can make it all the way bright you know the full brightness like without using a resistor so that's much preferred so i'm just gonna go ahead and leave it somewhere where you guys can see it without getting blinded the data connection pretty much is gonna be on pins on the on the display panel there's pins um i can they call it d4 to d7 that are the ones back here and those are going to be where the the four data lines coming from your data bus on the you know the whole wiring thing that's going to be s s 0 s 1 s 2 and s 3 and those are going to be the ones that go there and obviously make sure you put the right ones you know that little picture right there shows you uh which one is the relationship between the d and and the s lines okay so that's going to be the four of them there and other than that the only thing you do is uh you need one going to the d line on your data bus which in my case is this yellow one right here so this yellow wire is going to my d bus or my d line on the bus okay and then the pin that you're gonna control you know the the data into the display that's going to be the one that says lcd control pin so in this case for example i'm going directly to pin number 49 on the arduino for now you can use pins number 20 and 21 and pins i believe it was 30 to 53. somewhere i had read it was 49 but now i believe it says 30 to 53 okay so i'm using pin number 49 directly on the arduino all right so that's that's it for the wiring pretty much it looks pretty messy right here but just do one thing at a time and and everything will be okay you know if you don't jumble yourself up and i'm pretty sure it's gonna be kind of like with a seven segment displays you know it was most of the problems that i heard about were always down to the wiring after people told me i can get it to work i can't get it to work it always ended up being something with a wiring okay so if we go to the configurator here we go to the common nav pages here we have to do something first you have to decide whether you want yours to display five digits or six digits for the nav and com radios um you know some airplanes of course they only display two digits um like this one's right here but but in the cessna from airfoil labs at 172 it displays six digits so three before the decimal point and three after so we're going to make sure that we have six digits highlighted the one that's in green is the one that's highlighted so i'm gonna go ahead and put that um for six digits on both all right and we're gonna go ahead and do com2 and nav two just because on that airplane um that's an actual radio stack panel and not inside the gps the gns 530 so just for you know better visuals i'm going to go ahead and do com2 and nav2 so we're going to go ahead and click on that one select character lcd but first you have to decide which one is going to be assigned to so first we're going to go to 49 and we're going to tell it that we want to do a direct lcd display and remember like so i told you it was pins 20 and 21 you know if you try to click on some other ones you don't have that option there so we're gonna do it and it is now you see it it's only 249. so there is a little misprint on that page i guess because i had read somewhere else where it was only 30 to 49 and if you try to click on 50 you no longer get that option so obviously we have to do number 49 direct lcd display and it's a 16x2 so we'll leave it there i believe this bottom one is only if it's a character oled display so we don't have an oled we have an lcd so we'll leave it like that i've never played around with those so i don't even know what to tell you about those how different they are all right so now that we have a sign that we have an lcd panel on pin number 49 we're going to go ahead and click com2 active character lcd we'll select that display and we'll put it right there now here you select where in the panel it starts displaying so for now we're going to leave it on nine zero which is the first one and position zero which is the very left okay and we'll do that now come to standby character lcd we're gonna select a new entry there but this one we have to put since each one takes six positions uh i think the decimal point also counts as one so we're going to start the next one on the eighth position oops that's a nine that's not an eight and do that okay so that's um com1 and com2 now we're gonna do nav one nav2 active and f2 standby sorry uh character lcd a new entry and we'll leave that one on line number one which is the second line and we're gonna leave it at the very left position zero so we'll click done and the last one that we're gonna do is uh nav to standby character lcd new entry once again this is going to be line one which is the second line position zero remember in computer stuff you know always the first one usually is zero it's not one so that's why it's line zero is the first line and line one is the second line uh position eight uh so that'll work we'll just leave that and put done and we'll save our configuration file we'll call it data like we should replace whatever was there before and then let's say we're gonna jump into the simulator here reload the configuration file and i'll get myself out of the picture here so you can see the display but you can see right here and once again you know i can play around with the brightness and the contrast and you can see the difference it makes when you when you go to one extreme or the other see so you want it somewhere like right there looks pretty good and then the brightness you can also select you know if you go all the way to the left there's no backlight at all and then if you go all the way to the right you've got the full brightness which actually in this case it looks pretty good on the camera but just looking at it visually i think like right there looks pretty good so that there's that um so you can see that one of them has the six digits and one of them has the five digit but you can see right here that you know we got one to two point eight and one two seven point two which are showing up in in our little display here and then we got one one three point four and one four one one four point seven so if we change them around let's see you can see that they're changing on my display right there and then if we swap them everything swaps over now do the same for the the navs swap them over so yeah it's all working good all right so i'm going to pretend that i'm starting over again and i'm going to put the lcd display there but this time we're going to do something a little bit different i'm going to show you how you can put text into the the lcd display like if you want to put some custom text so we're going to choose uh com2 active character lcd what select pin 49 and put a new entry now we're going to leave it once again on the very left on line one which is zero and we're going to add this so basically to tell ourselves that this is com1 active so whatever you put here you can select whether you want it before or after whatever the parameter is so i want it before and i'm going to do that i'm going to put com1 active and then i want a couple of spaces after the the a so i'm just going to go ahead and put so this is going to be one oops one two or if you just want to not put anything you can just do one two three four and then put done and then we're gonna select com nav2 active character lcd new entry but this one is going to be on line number two which is one and we're gonna put text before but this one we're gonna call nav 2 1 2 3 4 and put done and i believe yeah that one was i think i messed up on this one i put com1 so it's actually com2 oops com2 one two three four done and we're gonna go ahead and save the configuration file yes okay so now that we have that we'll go back to the simulator or reload the configuration file again and there you go so now you got com2 you got four spaces and then you got the frequency and then nav two four spaces and then the frequency so that's how you do it now if you wanted to make this go all the way over here just because you know so it could line up this way over here i guess you can do five spaces and it'll start right here instead of right there where it's at now but i think it's better if it lines up on this side right here so that's pretty good all right so there you go that's how easy it is to use lcd displays with uh simvim x and real sim control hopefully it'll turn out to be a shorter one um so now you know you know how easy it is to actually put some data into lcd displays and it's really nice that they've added that option and that you know flexibility to put many different values on one display and choosing where on the displays you want it to show up so i think that this is really good i had never used an lcd display until you know i started playing around with it um yesterday when i went to buy another one so that i can record this video but uh it's pretty cool and it's pretty useful and it's i mean i keep saying that about this program and this is like by far the easiest way to do anything on the simulator stuff okay so hopefully this video will help some of you guys out that have been having issues with lcd panels um or who never tried it like me um and you know hopefully this will inspire you guys to go ahead and get some if you plan to use them in your setup quite easy to do like i said alright well thank you guys for watching once again and i'll see you on the next one

Channel: Qosmokid

Views: 258

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Id: NuREybgOOng

Length: 19min 44sec (1184 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 30 2021