Velleman MK158

[Didel]

Hi,

I have recently bought a Velleman MK 158 Mini LCD kit. This is a single line 16 char. green LCD. The fun thing about velleman products is that you have to wire them up yourself. Anyway, got my soldering stuff out and put it all together. When I attached it to a battery, I saw it working and was filled with great joy Normally, this is a stand-alone product, but in the instructions it also said how to connect it to the serial port. So I did that. It uses pin 2, 3 and 5. Then, I downloaded the software from the site, and tested it. It worked perfectly The only thing is, that the software hasn't got any options. You can enter some text (16 char. max... ), or display the time or date. The worst part is that it doesn't even update the time, so you have to send it out every minute again.

I would love to use LCD-Smartie and show some stats and stuff, but it didn't work out the way I hoped it would. When I connected it, I downloaded LCDSmartie and configured only the screen size, and pushed apply. The screen did start moving, but instead of showing the text I entered, it showed what seemed like a random string of text. After playing around with the different types of drivers, I concluded that Testdriver was as close as I could get to something reasonable, but instead of showing:
'1234ABCD', it showed: something familiar to 'gy1dn2d3rd4#hAweBwsCihDkh'. It did show what I entered, the only problem is that it has some unwanted characters in between.

Does anyone know how to get this lcd up and running with LCD Smartie, and what I should do for this?

To give you some idea of what it is, and some specs, look at the original velleman site: Velleman MK 158 site. The picture is wrong. It ISN'T a segment-display, but a normal lcd.

Also, I have some text found on the lcd itself:

Velleman MK 158 1 x 16 (ok, this is brand, model and screensize)

GDM1601C (was written on the lcd panel itself, on the back)
Datasheet (pdf)
rev2.0

HLH-2

RS232 : 2400 / 8 / 1

That's all I can offer you for now. If you need any more info, please ask, and I will try to supply you with it. I hope someone knows how to let this work

Oh, P.S.: I don't think it is a soldering mistake or something like that, because the original Velleman Software that came with it just works perfectly. It only doesn't have nearly any function...

P.P.S.; Sorry for the long read...

[mattcro]

I've built a few Velleman kits in the past, so this one intrigued me.

I had a quick look at the manuals and the program code for the supplied utility, and it doesn't look like the display can easily be used with Smartie as it doesn't provide the necessary display commands, such as "set cursor position".

However, you can do the basics with the test driver - in case you haven't seen it, the test driver info page is at http://lcdsmartie.sourceforge.net/testdriver.html (some of it is out of date, like the baud rate selection, which is done in the setup window now)

I think you can put the display in "Display a message" mode (press UP at power on??) and use it as a 1x16 LCD in Smartie. If I've read the manual right, your [Test Driver] should have something like:
Init=13
Fini=
GotoLine1=13
GotoLine2=
GotoLine3=
GotoLine4=

Hopefully that's about it. Just make sure you have the baud rate etc set to the appropriate value - 2400baud.

[wikusvandemerwe]

One thing you can do with this (I know it's going OT from LCD Smartie) is to download the VB source code from the Velleman website. I did this and added a host of new functionality to the program with the use of timer ocx controls - updating the time etc.

I moved away from the velleman displays when I discovered the likes of Matrix Orbital etc but I still have the source somewhere on an old abandoned HDD...