Using an LCD Controller Board with SimVimX/Real Sim Control (RSC)

hello everyone once again welcome back um as i've mentioned before you know i've been a little bit busy the last few weeks and although there are like five videos or six that i have in mind to record um most of them are in the back to basics you know series that i've been trying to do but this one even though it is like the foundation of how to work with the lcd controller board daughter board or slave board as they call it um it is somewhat complicated but i think i'm still going to call it one of my back to basics so anyway um we're going to need an arduino uno in order to use this for our daughter board uh to connect displays lcd displays to simvamx and real sim control so we're gonna go ahead and get started and hopefully it won't be a very long video so if you remember from the previous video we had connected an lcd display directly to the arduino so it goes directly you know to one of the pins on the arduino i believe it was pin number 49 that we did so now what we're going to do is we're going to take the uno arduino uno and we're going to connect that to the main board or the master board as they call it and we're going to connect the lcd to this board instead of to the arduino so in order to do that i think i'm going to go ahead and take you over to the website first of all so if we go to the website as we did last time we're going to go to the output section here and we're going to go to lcds and as i mentioned before the last time you know when you guys try to get into building something with this um software it's a good idea to come to the website and visit it and read it all specifically on the parts that you're working on because sometimes things do change you know so it's always better to actually come to the website to get all the latest up-to-date information and maybe it's something that i misspoke or or something that i missed you know you may be able to catch it here although i always try my best to give you the most correct and up-to-date information so we talked last time about how to connect you know the lcd displays directly to the arduino which is what we did down here so now we're not going to talk too much about that but i do want to talk a little bit about the about the potentiometer for the contrast and about the backlight that you need to connect you know the connections are going to be exactly the same for that whether you're going to do it directly to the arduino or you're going to use the the lcd controller board so if you don't remember how to do that i'm going to refer you back to my other video the one about connecting the lcd displays directly to the arduino so you can see how i did that there in case these drawings are not you know very clear to you or they don't make any sense even though they are very good all right so but today we're going to be talking about this right here we're going to be talking about connecting the board directly to the arduino and then we're going to connect the lcd displays to this board instead of the arduino okay so we're going to jump over to the simulator and first thing we need to do is flash the firmware on the nano so what i'm going to do for now is i'm going to disconnect my master board from the usb and we're going to prepare to flash the nano but first thing we need to do is we need to go to the simvim x plugin menu here and we're going to go to i o and hardware which is what's going to give us the ability to flash so as you can see it says make sure that the board that you want to flash is not connected to the usb and then click continue so now that you have you know this little menu here it says plug in the board into usb and then select the firmware type so let's go ahead and connect it and we're going to select the lcd and we have a uno 328p which is this one right here and then upload and you'll see this little screen come up and it said upload attempt to extension board finished so that's it and um one thing that i did notice that regardless of whether your board did flash properly or not or it is connected or not i've always seen this little message here that the lcd board is not connected but it was working properly so i'm not sure if this ever does show that it is connected so anyways we can go ahead and close that out and for now we can actually get out of the simulator because we're going to do all the connecting all right before we go any further it is noted that you are going to need to power the arduino we you're going to need to power it with an external power adapter a 5 volt i guess it could be 5 to 7 volts for the uno since this is not going to be connected to usb you are going to need to to power it and once again you can read the the website you know for the exact um cautions and warnings and everything about power but what i'm gonna do i'm just gonna use the barrel jack for this particular one which is a five volt one amp power supply and that's the one i'm gonna connect to the barrel jack there on the uno all right so first thing we need to do is like i said the ones for the contrast and the ones for the back light they're gonna stay all the power wiring is pretty much going to stay the same except for the 5 volts here i'm not going to take it from here because this one is coming you know from the arduino the master board so and you know usually for lcds he wants us to use a separate 5 volt power supply because you know they could draw more power but in my testing that i done even at full brightness i only saw it draw 19 milliamps so it's not very much it's actually less than some leds but so go ahead and uh we'll go ahead and disconnect this from here this is our positive power thing rail here so in my uno um right here we have the five volts output and we have a couple of grounds and then we have actually the voltage in so if you if you were not going to use a power supply with a barrel jack you could actually connect an actual wire just directly into here for the voltage in but i think it's a lot easier to use that so i'm going to go ahead and put this one here which is going to give me my 5 volts to the lcd i'm going to go ahead and put it right there and i'm going to put since the ground wires have to be connected and made common with everything connected to the master board i'm going to go ahead and put a ground there and put it into the main my main ground rail that i have over here all right now now this is where it gets a little bit interesting i'm gonna show you here so the connection for the slave board like i said the ground wires have to be made common and then the the five volts you know you're gonna have to get from the five volt supply either into the voltage in here or into the barrel jack um so we got those two now the other ones we have to do is you have to use that transmit and receive on 14 and 15 on the master board and bring them over to the transmit and receive zero and one over here so i'm going to go ahead and do that this is my 14 and 15 here and this is my 0 and one way over here all right so there you go and notice uh the transmit has to come to the receive over here and the receive over here has to come to the transmit over here so they're actually flopped so you can see that my purple one is on the transmit here and it's on the rx here and the same for the blue alright now for this right here if we look at the if we look at the wiring diagram for for the lcd here you can see that i'm trying to get a better look at it myself here you can see that the that that blue one right here is going over to a four over here and that is actually the d line so that's the one that when you were going directly to the arduino you were taking over to the d line um on the on your uh data bus i guess you can say so what i'm gonna do now is i'm gonna take the one that i had on the d line here which is this yellow one here and i'm gonna connect it to the a4 on my arduino uno which is actually this one right here all right so that's good right there and my focus keeps going out a little bit all right so now we're gonna take all the wires that were which is the s 0 through s 3 which is the address lines we're going to disconnect them from here from my data bus and these are actually going to go over here to a 0 through a3 so like the a0 through a3 is the equivalent of s0 through s3 on the address lines it's the same thing but instead of now instead of getting the address lines that come from the master board you're actually going to get them from the uno over here so we're going to go ahead and disconnect those four and then they have basically they have to be in the same order so if we look at this one right here you can see that d4 d5 d6 and d7 go to s0 through s3 so just make sure that you keep them the same that you keep them in that same order that whatever you know is s0 is 1 s2 s3 and make sure they go to a0 through a3 over here all right so that's pretty much all we have you know that like i said the the backlight wiring and the contrast wiring is the same okay the only other thing we need to do now is the the one that goes to the controller pin uh which is this green one i'm not sure if you can see the green one right here right by the ground i realize you can't see my mouse right here but it would be this white wire that i have right here that right now it was actually going to the pin number 49 on the arduino when it was connected directly but now that one has to go to whichever pin you want to assign it to on the board anywhere from pins to uh all the way to uh 13 or yeah 13 i think so i'm gonna go ahead and put it on pin number five right there and that's where we're gonna assign our board all right so now that all the wiring is done let me get rid of this right here and we'll go to the simulator here actually we'll go to the website first and we're going to go to the configurator so okay the first thing you need to do when you come to the configurator is i'm gonna go ahead and edit a a configure configuration file that i already had but we're gonna pretend that it's starting from new this so this is where i had uh number 49 i had it right there directly to the arduino but now we're going to tell the arduino that we're going to be using the the uno board so if you notice here on the picture it says slave lcd which is the 14 and 15. so you can click on any one of those and tell it you're going to add a slave board and it already knows that it's an lcd slave board because that you can only connect an lcd one there a servo board here and a stepper or a matrix here so it automatically populates it as an lcd board okay so first thing we need to do is we need to tell the configurator that we want to put a certain type of lcd display here so fortunately all of them are you know under the same one here this is only for character oled displays i've never used one of those so we're not going to mess with them again and so this is a 16x2 so we just leave it like that and confirm now we have an lcd display assigned there and now we can go ahead and put com1 character lcd on pin number five new entry and for this one we're gonna leave it on line zero and position zero which is on the very top left all right so that's it for that one now we're going to do the stem by one character lcd pin number five new entry but now we're gonna put it on position number nine so it can be near the middle of the the display and we're gonna put okay and then we're gonna do uh nav two active character lcd five new entry but this one we're gonna do on line one which is the second line and then put done and then once again we're gonna do nav2 standby character lcd pin five new entry now we're gonna do line one which is the second line position nine so it could be in the middle of the second line and we're going to be done so we'll save it uh we'll put it inside the sim bim x folder name it data.config yes i want to replace whatever was there all right so now we can go ahead and go to the simulator here alright so as you can see right now we have no master board connected and no lcd board connected because i haven't put it back so i'm going to go ahead and connect the master board first and remember right now the daughter board doesn't have any power so i need to connect my little power adapter here okay and we just gave it power here so now we're gonna now that we updated the data file we're just gonna go ahead and hit reload configuration here all right and it came alive but we need to mess with the contrast there it is all right so you can see that it's working there now if i go to my aircraft here and i play around with the with the frequencies you can see that it's moving as i'm moving it inside the simulator and if i swap them they swap now i'm going to mess around with a nav too so let's swap that one there we go so everything's working fine so as you can see up here it does tell me that the lcd board is not connected but as you can see clearly it's working fine i have all my frequencies i change them both and then i swap them and everything is working fine so i'm not sure what's up with that message there but it's working perfectly okay so i guess uh that was not as hard as i thought it was gonna be to to go through the whole process um it's pretty simple it's pretty self-explanatory you know when i first did the the other video connecting it directly to the arduino it looked like it was a mess you know like there's a bunch of wires and everything and yeah there is a lot of wires but like i said if you just take it one step at a time you know do whatever you you feel comfortable with first and then go to the next step and the next step i think it doesn't get too confusing it's actually quite easy if you break it down as i said before in the last video i had never even played around with lcd displays until the day before i recorded that other video and i got it working on my very first try and the same with this one you know i went through the whole process and everything just to make sure you know that i was going to be telling you guys the right way of doing things and it worked right away the very first time so it's really not that hard you know just watch your wiring you know make sure like i said before read the documentation really carefully because they are very adamant about the fact that you are going to need to use a separate power for the display backlight because that's the one that takes up a lot the most amperage um but i think that if you're just gonna maybe use one or two or three displays i think it'll be fine just getting it from the from the uno using the power adapter you know supplying the uno and that should be fine but if you want to do it exactly the right way you know i would say you know maybe just provide a separate 5 volt power supply for the lcd backlights all right um and once again you know if you need any more clarification on how to configure the or how to wire the potentiometer for the contrast in the resistor for the backlight you can go ahead and see the previous video on connecting it directly to the arduino and i went into it a little bit more detail there because i didn't think it was worth taking up the extra time to explain it all over again on this one alright so hopefully that will clear up any doubts or any fears that you guys may have about using lcd displays and it'll inspire you to go ahead and try one well thank you very much for watching once again and as always i'll see you on the next one

Channel: Qosmokid

Views: 159

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Id: wnUyQUrTaKw

Length: 18min 55sec (1135 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 04 2021