LCD Driver and Girder 3.1 Help needed.

[Ron]

Doesn't help you anymore but Girder 3.2 reports the name of the missing plugin.

[siwilson]

Mike,


I also have this problem on a Matrix Orbital VFD the VFD 2041

The Motherboard monitor applet that comes with LCDriver doesn't show the cursor.

OT: Could you tell me how to enter the control character in the text box in Girder. This would allow you to use a lot of the extended functions without having to have them specifically programmed into the plugin.

TKS.

Simon

[siwilson]

Thanks Mike,

Let me know when you have it done and I can test it.

Can you see any reason why the control codes would be blocked by LCDriver ? Being able to send extended controls to the display in the text box would really help.

[siwilson]

Sorry Mike,

It didn't fix the problem. I still get the flashing cursor :(

Actually 3.2 beta was/is onerous, It appears you have to re-learn ALL your event strings. The Winamp ones appear to be missing from the DVD Spy, so I am not sure how to relearn them.

Seeing as this didn't fix the problem I am going to stick with 3.1.

Unless anyone has any suggestions. ?

[siwilson]

OK, a brain fart on my part :-?

The motherboard monitor does still show the cursor. I don't know what I was thinking about, but it must be something else.

If you can tell me what needs doing I will chase this down.

Thanks

[siwilson]

Thanks

[MMcM]

I've updated the readme as you suggested. Sorry for the ordeal.

The cursor hides properly on the CrystalFontz display that I have. What kind do you have?

I'm willing to experiment with the order of operations, provided you can verify that there is some program that uses LCDriver and does not have the problem. It may also be something like needing to reset it every time after calling clear.

[MMcM]

The MBMLCD source is available from the LCDriver site. I checked and the only obvious difference is the order of functions at init time, just as Rick suggested. I'll make that change to the Girder plug-in, double check that it hasn't broken CrystalFontz, and then we can see if it helps.

[MMcM]

I verified that the change does not break CrystalFontz, as we'd hoped.

I have sent Ron LCD 1.10 with the change. Please let me know whether it fixes the problem with other displays.

This version only works with the Girder 3.2 beta. I hope that is not too onerous.

[MMcM]

Since I cannot see any difference in the operations that MBMLCD does and those that the Girder plugin does, viz. lcdRequest(); lcdSetCursor(0); lcdSetWrap(0,0); lcdClearDisplay(); lcdSetCursorPos(); lcdSendString();, my first inclination would be to doubt that LCDriver ever clears it successfully. However, Simon, you said that it wasn't there in the MBM case.

I guess if we're absolutely sure that LCDriver does work sometimes, I could throw together a little VB app with separate buttons to call each of the functions in turn. Then someone with one of those displays could experiment.

[MMcM]

I told LCDriver (v1.2) that I have a VFD2041 on an unused port. I fired up portmon (http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/portmon.shtml). I compared what was output to the manual (http://www.matrixorbital.com/pdfs/vfd2041.pdf).

Here is what I get using Girder to output the string ABC to row 2 column 1.



FE 58 Clear Display
FE 42 00 Display On (indefinitely)
FE 47 01 01 Go To Position (0,0)
FE 46 Display Off
FE 4B Cursor Off
FE 44 Auto Line Wrap Off
FE 52 ??
FE 58 Clear Display
FE 47 02 03 Goto Position (2,1)
41 42 43 'A' 'B' 'C'


Conspicuously absent is FE 54, both according to the Matrix Orbital documentation and Rick's batch file. I suspect that the unknown FE 52 is supposed to it that.

Someone who actually has one of these displays and so can do some testing may need to work with Ryan to resolve this.

[MMcM]

I see. Thanks. I missed that typo when searching the manual.

So, the problem appears to be that it uses FE 4B Cursor Off instead of FE 54 Cursor Blink Off. An understandable confusion.

[MMcM]

LCD 2.0 will have direct serial support for Matrix-Orbital displays. This should fix this problem. I would not have done it just for that; the primary goal is to support keypad input. But it is a side benefit.

[waja]

I've just started using this driver/plugin and would like to know if anyone has found that the cursor doesn't go away? BTW, I am using Win2k.

I browsed the source code and found that the driver is using LCDriver. There is a call upon start up to clear the cursor, but it doesn't work on my (all?) systems.

I've looked at another program that uses LCDriver and if the cursor is clearing correctly (don't know for sure as I didn't run that program), then the problem may just be the order in which the start up APIs are called. (E.g. lcdSetCursor(0); lcdSetWrapMode(0, 0); lcdClearDisplay(); vs lcdClearDisplay(); lcdSetWrapMode(0, 0); lcdSetCursor(0); )

Also, I had a big problem getting the sample gml file for DVDSpy plugin to run. I knew that I needed the LCD Driver plugin, but I didn't know that I needed the Alarm Timer 1.2 plugin. Girder displayed Cannot Find Softplugin, but didn't display any information about which one it could not find. When I clicked on Settings (Plugin Tab), Girder crashed everytime (3.1.3c). I finally just enabled all the plugins and now things are working. Painful process.

Two things could have helped here:
1. DVDSpy readme could have mentioned Alarm Timer plugin
2. Girder could have displayed information about the missing plugin (e.g. Name or Device Number.)

Thanks,

[waja]

Mike,

OT: Could you tell me how to enter the control character in the text box in Girder. This would allow you to use a lot of the extended functions without having to have them specifically programmed into the plugin.

TKS.

Simon

Simon,
I was wondering this also and I tried entering the command funtion manually. (The command function is ALT key down, 2, 5, 4, ALT key up, T). But it didn't work. LCDriver provided the API that Mike uses and I'm guessing that its either filtering the control set or wrapping the data within another control set (eg. Go To Position).

[waja]

I got rid of the blinking cursor :D

I have my display connected to comm port 4, so I wrote a little batch file called setuplcd.bat and placed it in my StartUp folder in my start menu.
Here is the content of the file.

mode com4:BAUD=19200 PARITY=N DATA=8 STOP=1
echo þT>com4
echo þX>com4

[waja]

I verified that the change does not break CrystalFontz, as we'd hoped.

I have sent Ron LCD 1.10 with the change. Please let me know whether it fixes the problem with other displays.

This version only works with the Girder 3.2 beta. I hope that is not too onerous.

Mike,
I have tested a number of the apps that work with LCDriver and have found that none of them were successful in clearing the flashing cursor on my HTPC. I tested them using Win2k, not sure if there is a difference in any of the other OSs.

I'm not up to 3.2 yet. I've just finally gone through my 3.1 port of 3.0 and cleaned up all the errors that I could find. I found that most of my goto calls were missing targets.

For now, I use the above BAT file to clear the display and stop the blinking cursor. It works fine and lets me know when Win2k is about to start (my HDTV displays nothing until the desktop is active).

3.2 in June, if I'm lucky.

[waja]

According to the Matrix manual
Auto Scroll Off
ASCII 'R',Hex 52, Decimal 82
Syntax 0xFE 0x82 <----- Should be 0xFE 0x52

To turn the automatic line scrolling off, send a command prefix followed by the character 'R'.




Counting down the hours till I leave for Bonaire :D