andy vt's tools & blog

Yeah the Blue w/white is what I got as well.

 That's great news that you believe it will work!

 Mine is the blue with white letters, the 4x20. Is LCDWriter written for 2x20 or 4x20 displays?

 2x16 or 2x20

 What happens if LCDWriter is used with a 4x20 LCD?  Will it simply write to the first two lines?

Probably, I've never tested it.

What kind of info would you want to see on the other two lines?

 What if you had a blank line added on the top for the 4 x 20 so that it is even Blank - Data - Data - Blank....

Just an idea that I assume would be easy to implement...

 Nothing special for the extra lines, just thought maybe it would be easier to fit the data in four lines.  A clock would be nice on one of the bottom lines.

 Otherwise, if the last two lines were left blank and could be written to by something like LCD Smartie, that would be good

 I see that you already have the time.  Anyway, a little separation of data would be good with four lines, like:

 Recording   -   Ch:11

The Office

O    28:03

5:28 PM

 Where O is the recording indicator and 28:03 is a timer.

Anyway, that is no big deal.  If the LCD2USB screens get supported I will be more than happy!

While I was waiting for the display to come, I wrote a Lcd Smartie driver wrapper so any display that works with Lcd Smartie should work with LcdWriter (the dll must be named LcdSmartieDisplay.dll and placed in the app folder).

The driver for the VLSMCE VFD for Lcd Smartie was used for testing, and so far is working better than the one I wrote (:() so it should work with this one as well.

In addition, since I was created a new display anyway, a base class implementing ILcdWriter was created which handles most of the common logic so anyone looking to add a display that isn't supported by LcdSmartie will have a much easier time.

I'm going to run it for a few days, and assuming everything keeps working as well as it currently is the installer will be available soon.

 That's excellent news!  Is this a separate dll to be used with LCDWriter, or a change to the program itself?  If it is a change, will it be carried out in the 64 bit versions as well?

 I can't wait to see this work!

 I have the LCDMODKIT screen with the LCD2USB driver and windows 7 64 bit ultimate.  Let me know if I can help test or anything.  

How important are custom characters?  I haven't been able to make that work with the wrapper and the VlsLis display.  Not sure if it's a problem with the driver or me :)

I would expect x64 to work as long as there's a driver for it.

 Custom characters don't mean much to me as right now I just have LCD Smartie outputing the time and the date...  Not so cool.   Anything would be better than that.  

 Agreed.  Any sort of media center information would be a vast improvement over what I've got going on right now.

What's the status of the project?  Remaining stable?

Straight text works great.  I'm going to change the way the smartie dll is referenced so it can be anywhere and doesn't have to be named in a particular way. 

 If I can get a seat on the train should be able to finish that up and test it when I get home :)