SMART Serial 4 Digit LCD Display (SMARD4)

We developed a smart serial 4 digit LCD (the SMARD4) to save us time, money, and code space in our own consulting and projects—it did! It worked so well, we thought others might benefit as well.

How is it smart? It has lots of features built in that normally have to be coded by the user. It also allows total and easy control of all digits, segments, colon, and decimal points.

Have you ever needed to monitor all 8 pins of a port? The single command: SEROUT,portb.0,2,[254,8,portb] displays an 8 bit binary number with 1's and blanks (up to 11111111). You can immediately see if portb.4 is high or low (and the state of the other 7 pins as well). Works for registers too as well and any byte sized variable.

Have you ever needed to have your display on for long periods of time but had to worry about battery life? The command: SEROUT,portb.0,2,[254,3,1] leaves the display on but puts the SMARD4 in low power mode (uses about 30-150X less current than other serial LCD displays (< 0.035mA) . We have some on our bench that have been on for over a year using 3 AAA batteries (series) with displayed number incremented every 5 seconds – our goal is 2+ years.

Have you ever wanted to scroll text across the screen (Commands 35 & 36), display easy negative signs (Command 29), send lots of numbers and not want to dig and convert each number to ASCII (Command 6), Blink digits (Commands 10-14), then you may want to try the SMARD4. There are many more features than those listed here.

The SMARD4 is a debugging and prototyping dream and is perfectly suitable for OEM applications.

Although there are a lot of features, each feature is a small, tight, and optimized routine. Each routine has been thoroughly tested for accuracy and timing. Find the examples above in completed programs and more information at www.cruxanalysis.com

Thanks,

Paul
Salt Lake City, Utah USA
Forum Member since February 21, 2003
PB and PBP owner and user since 1998