Jaycar are having a clearance sale on their Displaytech LCDs! With their “buy one get one free” deal at the moment, this comes to around $2.50 AUD for EACH LCD. That’s ridiculously cheap! Shipping is only $5 too. Needless to say, I did order some this morning; twenty-two LCDs. A mix of character displays as well as graphic ones. Most of the LCDs use a pretty standard parallel interface, but some are serial. Trawling through the Displaytech product guide for model numbers was not an easy task, so if you’re after an LCD, you might want to consult me.

Most of the LCDs I got were of the FSTN type with white backlight, similar effect to the LCD pictured above (photo shamlessly ripped off Sparkfun).

The LPC2378 Dev Platform/Board. It’s got a colour LCD, joystick, buttons, SD card slot, 3-axis accelerometer, RS232 ports, SPI, I2C, UARTs, CAN, 6x PWM, Ethernet, audio jacks… and the microcontroller is an ARM (which I have had no experience with), so it’s a great opportunity to learn! Much more powerful than AVRs or MSP430s. 

The corresponding JTAG Programmer.

Two of these XBee (Series 2) Wireless Modules. First time experiementing with wireless stuff, should be fun.

The Xbee USB Explorer, basically to interface the XBee’s to the computer.

FTDI USB to serial IC breakout board. No purpose really, would just be handy to have around.

MAX3232 IC’s. Apparently not cheap here in Australia, they wanted $6.75 a pop for these at Jaycar. Very very very useful chips. Converting RS232 signals (-15V to 15V) to TTL levels (0V to 5V).

Finally, I’m nearing completion of this MSPOnewire project for Sunswift. Except for a few error checking features and stability, the msponewire (msponewire = name of the project/board) works pretty well. The basis for this project is the 1-wire network, upon which we are planning to attach many DS18S20 temperature sensors as part of the telemetry system of the solar car. For example, monitoring battery, array and cockpit temperature. The 1-wire bus system actually uses two wires, ground and power/data. The devices that are designed to be attached to this network can survive momentarily without power, and thus, the power line can be used for communications.

On the top left of the board (as seen above, with the black/white wire), there is the 1-wire connector and the associated 1-wire controller electronics. In this case, we are using the DS2480B 1-wire controller IC which makes the network relatively easy to implement. This IC communicates with the MSP430 microcontroller (seen in the middle of the board) through a standard UART link. The ribbon cable at the top is the JTAG programming port (connects to a parallel port) and we use the mspgcc toolchain for most of our MSP430 work.

The DS18S20 thermometers (seen above), are all manufactured with a unique 64-bit ID. At startup, the msponewire tries to “find” all these devices on the network by successively going through a binary search tree/algorithm. It then stores these unique addresses of each device (in our case, purely temperature sensors) and polls each sensor for their data repeatedly. Once the data has been checked for error by the MSP430, they get sent over the CAN network (CAN controller, transceiver, connector seen on top right of the board). Through a USB->Serial converter and a CAN->Serial node, we can read this telemetry data on minicom.