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Robin Cornelius wrote: > > For little or no reason i added a LCD display to my Debian server at work > > http://www.cornelius.demon.co.uk/LCD.JPG > > Looks cool eh? > The geek in me says... COOOOOOOL! :-) > I'm a bit stuck how to make it really useful however, the display is a > 128x64 with a KS0108 controller and most LCD projects out there seem > to only support character displays while this is a full graphical one. > I have found a pre written driver as part of the linux video disk > recorder project, a plug in for these displays > http://developer.berlios.de/projects/graphlcd/ > I guess something like this could be of use in a server room so techies can glance at the LCD to see that the system is running okay. I guess uses would be things like CPU load, free memory, disk space, network usage, or even just trying to get Doom running on it would be cool :-) > There are some test tools as part of the main package and i have > hacked the showtext tool to allow continuous stdin so now i can print > text files or pipe a log file to the display, which i think is cool. I > think i should finish this properly and send a patch back to the > developers. I currently have syslog tailing on the display :-) > I would like to have a button really to change what is displayed but > not sure the best way to go about adding this. One way I guess if you have enough pins left on the parallel port would be to hack together an old Atari 2600 joystick to parallel port adaptor. Then rather than having a joystick wired in, you could have something with buttons wired up to +5V and then back to the individual pin on the parallel port. If the pins get +5V to them they would register this as either joystick movements or the pressing of a firebutton. From memory, the Atari 2600 joystick (which is also used on the C64, Amstrad CPC, Atari ST, Amiga) is one of the easiest to wire up since it generally only has the 4 directions (up, down, left and right) and one fire button giving you 5 possible buttons. I'm sure there must be a driver which could be used with this, not sure if there is anything in the Kernel, I can't say I've looked at getting a joystick working on a Linux box. Other alternative assuming the parallel port hasn't got enough free pins would be to try using the standard PC joystick port (found on most cheapo sound cards and most standard ATX motherboards). Not sure though if the PC joystick port is analogue or digital though. Rob -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG Mail majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with "unsubscribe list" in the message body to unsubscribe. FAQ: www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html