after seeing Futuremans and mr_kholls fantastic VFD display pictures, I am thinking of using VFDs for my SEQ-V4 with a custom frontpanel…
I am now investigating some “cheap ones” available here in Germany, the Futaba M402SD10FJ. You can get two of them for € 43,82 per piece plus shipping from Mercateo.
a) will they work with the Core32? They offer jumper settings for parallel mode (motorola), parallel mode (intel i80) and serial mode.
b) where can you get VFD display filters for 40x2 displays (i´d like to obtain an orange output, if possible). I know, that PSC creates them, but I found no retailers for end customers…
Also, I am aware, that the display area is a little bit smaller (137mm display width instead of 147.5mm display width on standard 40-character lcds), but the frontpanel will be an adjusted version of Wilba´s really cool CS, so I don´t worry too much.
I read the datasheet and haven’t found any topic which would be in contradiction with the MBHP_CORE_STM32 requirements.
You will have to jumper the VFD for Motorola mode (see chapter 6)
However, since nobody tried this VFD before, it’s probably better to test only one display before buying a second one. It would also be advantageous to have a return option for the case that the VFD isn’t working properly for any reason.
Note also that the power consumption is pretty high - the 7805 of the core module will need a heat sink! It could make sense to use a dedicated 7805 for the two VFDs.
I think Seppoman made use of them about 2 years ago. He had to do some fixes in the PIC-Core display driver.
I’ve used a different model back then that has only a classic parallel interface. My old MIOS8 driver can be found on www.seppoman.de. Recently I’ve tried to do a VFD->Hitachi emulator for these VFDs using an AVR controller, but discovered that keeping up with the needed response times is quite hard…
Your VFD looks like it already has built in “Hitachi emulation”, i.e. what they call M68 mode.
I’ve also tried some Noritake VFD with emulation interface, and it had some compatibility problems in 4 bit mode, plus it is quite slow, just like the old Futaba one. But I think speed issues are not too much of a problem anymore under MIOS32 because of the underlying RTOS/task management.
thanks, seppoman, will keep you posted. as a sidenode, it is incredible how nice they look, in my opinion, they offer a lot more visual eyecandy than common lcds…
Couldn´t help and work a little bit ahead of time (the vfd mbseq photo tutorial currently lags behind a step :)) - the vfds look awesome, really really cool, something my cam is not able to capture. currently i do not have the core32 flashed with mbseqv4, so i hope the character problems are gone after the boot loader is finished… i read about these problems a time ago here in the forum, some characters were displayed as double characters… well, we will see how this can be fixed
thanks for the encouragement, TK, i am so glad i bought them
edit: unfortunately, after uploading mbseqv4 in mios studio, the problem did not go away… any hints are welcome
btw. the display should be in motorola mode by default - it looks like some characters are shifted, e.g. “Notd” instead of “Note” and “Ahn. 0” instead of “Chn. 0”.And I am sure I read about this not so long before, but can´t find it…
I just tested with disconnected D0-D3 (hoping for a forced 4-bit mode), but that increased the display garbage (seems like it still uses 8-bit mode).
Grounding D0-D3, while D4-D7 are connected blanks the screen.
Connecting all 8 data wires looks partially good:
ca 50% of characters are ok, ca 50% are “shifted” by a few ASCII digits. E.g. an “e” becomes a “d”, a “C” becomes an “A”.
Any suggestions how to fix that?
Has anyone read the thread with the partially replaced characters lately? - I searched for two hours today and cannot find it, although i know it is there - this makes me nervous
Thx!
Would be willing to adapt an app_lcd driver, but I just don´t know yet how to start… any pointers are welcome…
