LCD display using DAQ USB6008

[KayK]

hello,

firstly, im stil new to LabVIEW actually...hope someone can help me out with my problem.
thanks a lot for those who willing to help..
im trying to use the DAQ USB6008 to simulate a 16 x 2 character LCD display.
im using LabVIEW 8.5...
can anyone teach me how to simulate the LCD using LabVIEW and the DAQ USB6008 ?

[Dennis_Knutson]

What exactly do yo mean? You use the word simulate. You can drive (control) a LCD display. That would mean you would want to stimulate a display. Or, you could have a simulated display on a LabVIEW front panel that is driven by what you read from the DAQ.

[KayK]

oh..actually what i want to do is...
im taking in readings from a few temperature sensors...
then i need to display the readings on a LCD display which is a 16 x 2 LCD screen...
the problem is how can i build the VI to do the LCD display thing?

[Dennis_Knutson]

That would depend on the LCD display. Do you have a make, model, data sheet? What are the inputs to it? Have you searched the forum for 'LCD Display'?

[KayK]

i have attached the datasheet of the LCD here.
the LCD have 16 pins with digital inputs..
so how LabVIEW can do the displays things on the LCD?

[Dennis_Knutson]

The good news is that the 6008 has 12 digital lines so you don't have to work the data in two 4 bit operations. It also looks like the data is represented as ASCII. You will convert each character you want to display into a string and you can type cast that to a numeric. Wire that value to a digital DAQmx Write. Something like is shown below. It does not show the control lines. It looks like you would just need to add the signal to clock the data in.

Message Edited by Dennis Knutson on 07-05-2008 12:18 PM

[KayK]

oh i see...
ya i know USB6008 has 12 digital I/O port and it will be easier i think.
by the way, can you send me that VI like what you show me on the picture?
maybe i will be needing it. Thank you.

[Dennis_Knutson]

Sure. Here's one with a String to Byte Array function and the clock signal. The input can be a multiple character string. Since you will probably be calling this multiple times, I would recomend that you place the creation and closing of the tasks in the top level VI and call this as a subVI.

[RnDMonkey]

I've got a working 20x4 line display of this type working. It's very unfinished/unpolished though, so I resist posting it. Maybe once I've done some more work on it.

[RnDMonkey]

Well, I think I've got something that's worth presenting, so here it is. I made it as a parent VI with 4 SubVI's since there is a lot of stuff going on. It just occured to me that you could make the different lines as a loop with shift registers, so maybe you will choose to do so. Let me know how this works for you, or if you had already figured it out.