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Helping Your Microcontroller Communicate With The Outside World
So, you have a arduino based project and you're attempting to find a method for it to speak to the world outside. What are the options?
You could use two LEDs, maybe of different colours, to indicate different states. This is excellent for showing straightforward states, like the bootloader is running, or the actual program you expected loaded on the device. That is great, but you can't communicate all that much - flashing LEDs will only leave you guessing, if you try to indicate too much.
An LCD display is a way of showing much more, you can display text, numbers, results, even a menuing system. Most LCD displays will allow you to send custom characters as well , even tho just a small number, making simple graphics are practical. Nevertheless most LCD displays are quite small, and are only really viewable when you're very near to the display itself.
An alternative technique is an alphanumeric LED display. This is rather like the numeric display in your clockradio, except rather than having 7 segments, it has14, or in a few cases sixteen. A 14 segment display allows a much greater variety of characters than a seven segment display. Letters as well as numbers can be displayed and even varied punctuation symbols. And the enormous advantage is that these displays are at least half an inch tall - and some are even an inch high or more! This suggests they can be viewed from across the room, making it easy to understand what your project is attempting to say.
Talking with alphanumeric LED displays varies according to the actual module you have. Often it is a matter of shifting in bits one at a time, since each digit has a shift register linked with it. In some other cases, the display module has a microcontroller embedded in the display itself, so that you can communicate using asynchronous serial commands. In either case, only a few pins from your microcontroller are required to display bright, colored text.
An additional benefit of these displays is the ability to chain one to the next one. So a four digit 16 segment display can be connected to the following one - so creating a much bigger display. This technique of daisy chaining means you aren't constrained by the size of the display itself, only by how many you would like to link together.
For a great, colourful way of displaying information, try an alphanumeric LED display to add extra personality to your project.
Embedded Adventures is a great place to find news, information, tutorials and products to help with your next microcontroller based project. It has everything from 14 segment displays to microcontroller platforms and programming tools.
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