Bit Mapping onto an Alphanumeric Display

Getting a 1602a LCD to act like a bit-map display using custom characters.

[@TheGreatMunky]

ALPHANUMERIC! -Enzo

[@whatthefunction9140]

no github?

[@NickMoore]

My code will never see the light of day, it took me 2 iterations to completely avoid GOTOs.

[@trey1531]

Did you make a new channel? I think KZbin unsecribed me from you.

[@NickMoore]

I'm still uploading to this channel just a less frequently. I have a few projects on the go at the moment and I'll hopefully be able to demo them later this summer.

[@tiagotiagot]

What's the purpose of the other blank characters?

[@ddlow6455]

What did you use to make those slides?

[@NickMoore]

They were mostly hand drawn using LibreCAD. The bit and byte maps were made with a LibreOffice Calc and I did the finishing using GIMP.

[@MadyWinter]

Maybe you actually did that anyway, but instead of doing 2^..., you can use the bitshift operator to do the same thing ( 1

[@NickMoore]

No way >_< I wrote my own little squaring function so I wouldn't have to include another math library when I compiled. Thanks!

[@kaysb80]

Not bad! :) While this makes the code very dynamic, and allows you to animate any pixel in the 20/16 grid, you could also implement this by only modifying the bits in one character, and move the character around when the dot moves past the characters boundaries. This would work since the dot is in max one character location at any point. This way you could have a larger playing field.

[@NickMoore]

That's my next step (if I keep at this project). I've seen others use persistence of vision to flash the backlight and move the characters all over the screen to get bit-map use of the entire screen. I'm not sure I could write something that runs fast enough to pull that off though. Thanks!

[@man6765]

I think that was the first video that you have made where the majority of the content was kinda boring to me. But I still learned something and I think it is pretty cool that you made that. Did you use an arduino?

[@NickMoore]

It's hard to make software exciting (you should see the slow motion compiling footage) but I made this video specifically because it can be used by others, the 1602a display is cheap and all over ebay. I'm using a Basic Stamp from Coridium, it's an Arm M0 with firmware that lets you program it in a modified version of Basic. QBasic was my first language so I decided to go with something I know first. I'll likely only do one more video about this project on the subject of wiring and designing the program at the flow-chart level, then I'll be back to physics! My cloud chamber is getting close to finished so I'll be able to test some household radioactive sources. Thanks!

[@man6765]

I bought a bunch of arduino stuff because I am very mechanical and wish I could integrate some programming and microprocessor magic into my projects but honestly its been sitting on a shelf now for a year and I know almost nothing about code of any kind so... yea. I should probably stick to rebuilding bulldozer engines and welding. I'm enough of a nerd to watch this video so maybe someday my kid will teach me.

[@NickMoore]

From what I have seen a lot of Arduino code is made available by others so all you have to do is stitch it together. Arduino is probably going to be my next step after I run out of these Basic chips.

[@jestempies]

I think you could make the addressing calculation easier by stacking chars in columns instead of rows, i.e. [ ACEG ] [ BDFH ] instead of: [ ABCD ] [ EFGH ]

[@brainfornothing]

Good to know if I need that function someday, you did all the work already ;) Thanks for sharing !

[@NickMoore]

Glad you liked it, a more general application is mapping 2D data onto 1D memory (storing a 2D array in a 1D array).