[mythtv-users] Re: LCDProc, gentoo, and the SilverStone LC03V

[Paul]

Carl Alexander <carlalex-mythtv at overlords.com> wrote:

>LCDProc, gentoo, and the SilverStone LC03V case/VFD. Has anyone gotten .
>this combination to work with a ASUS A8V (Socket 939) Motherboard? I
>can't get so much as the LCDProc equivalent of "hello world" up, so
>configuring Myth to work with the VFD seems very far off.
>
>   --- Carl

I don't have the exact same system as you but have the Silverstone LC03V
case with the VFD, LCDproc-0.4.5, Fedora Core 2, Aopen MK79G-1394
motherboard.

I had problems with my VFD at first. Some times it would work OK
other times it would not produce any output at all. It turned out that my
VFD was
shoddily made and there where dry solder joints and one pin had no solder
on it at all on the header where the cable plugs in. Once I resoldered the
pins it has worked fine ever since or at least it always shows some sort of
output!

There are still a few problems with the Samsung VFD used by SilverStone such
has the
character set is different than the standard HD44780 which causes a few
strange characters
to appear sometimes. The most noticable being the solid block char is
replaced by a Y with
dots above it. It is possible to remap the characters by editing the
hd44780-charmap.h and
recompiling. I just changed the last 255 to 160 in the last line which is
the closest match I
could find to the solid block char. There are also problems with the
horizontal bars. I have
a patched version of hd44780.c that fixes that. Email me if you want it. I
don't think the list
will be very pleased if I attach it to this email!

I'm still having the occasional problem with the VFD not erasing all chars
before it updates
a line which causes the occasional char at the end of a line which should no
be there. Not a
big problem but anoying non the less.

Once I could get it to show some sort of output getting it to work with
Mythtv was easy just
make sure you uncomment 'DEFINES += LCD_DEVICE' in settings.pro then do the
usual qmake, make distclean, make, make install stuff.

It seems to be working fine except in MythMusic. In the play back screen it
just shows the
current time and nothing about the track that is playing. And in the
selection screen it just
keeps scrolling 'Danger Will Robinson' across the VFD? Are there any other
Myth users with
an LCD out there with similar problems?

A few things that I can remember that my help you set up your VFD:

In the LCDd.conf file

Driver=HD44780

In the [HD44780] section
ConnectionType=winamp
Size=16x2

If you are starting the LCDd as a service make sure you set Foreground=no

Good luck.

Paul