[mythtv-users] Interesting LCD Display

[Yeechang Lee]

stuart <stuart at xnet.com> says:
> Staying w/Bob's original post about the PicoLCD (self contained USB
> 4 line LCD text display w/IR receiver and buttons for ~$50):
> 
> Has anyone gotten this to work under Linux w/MythTV.

Yes. I'd meant to post on my experience and this is as good a time as
any.

> Specifically the IR receiver?

Sadly, haven't tried. I didn't even know that there was an IR sensor
until I received it. Lcdproc does have IR support, from my
understnding. I use the sensor on my HDHomeRun so unless my setup
change I won't have any incentive to look into it.

Now that I've (inadequately) answered what you were most interested
in, let me briefly discuss the device itself.

Since there's no stock LCDproc rpm for Centos 5, I grabbed the Fedora
7 SRPM (Fedora 6 would be preferable assuming it's also the latest
stable 0.5.2 version, but the earliest I could find was for 7) and
built it. It doesn't have the picolcd driver. Not sure that matters,
anyway, because the picolcd driver in the stock 0.5.2 version is, I
believe, only for the 20x2 version, not the 20x4.

The tarball avaialble at mini-box.com is a CVS version of 0.5.2. Since
I prefer using RPMs whenever possible, and since I can't figure out
why checkinstall (which auto-builds packages directly from source)
isn't working on my 64-bit Centos frontend yet, and since the compiled
version of the CVS lcdproc at mini-box.com is for i386 only, I
compiled from source then manually copied picolcd.so into
/usr/lib64/lcdproc.

With the above the 20x4 display works, with the following caveats:

* The backlight is very dim compared to how it is when the machine is
  first powered up. I am not sure whether it's something that can be
  fixed within LCDd.conf or if the variance between the stock RPM and
  the CVS picolcd.so driver is causing it.

* Restarting LCDd from the command line with the stock RedHat-style
  init scripts in the RPM causes it to output tons of data to the
  screen (so much so that even logging out won't kill it, over SSH at
  least). Also, this means that LCDd, when started near the end of the
  boot cycle, beeps repeatedly until (I think) stdout from the driver
  is redirected. Fiddling with the log level and output options in
  LCDd.conf has no effect as far as I can tell. Again, unclear if this
  is something the driver mix is causing.

I need to try using a different LCDproc package and see if that helps
these issues, and/or just bite the bullet and completely install the
CVS LCDproc from source.

-- 
Frontend:		P4 3.0GHz, 1.5TB software RAID 5 array
Backend:		Quad-core Xeon 1.6GHz, 6.6TB sw RAID 6
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Accessories:		47" 1080p LCD, 5.1 digital, and MX-600