Re: [lcd4linux] Revisisted > Help > Using LCD4Linux on Toshiba Magnia SG-20

[Michael R. <re...@eu...>]

Hi Simon,

> I had posted a message a while back in regards to which driver to use
> for the Toshiba Magnia SG-20.
I remember.

> Basically, it's a 2-line by 16- character backlit LCD along with a
> scroll button.  Toshiba refuses to release the source code / rpm to
> allow users to use a more current version of RedHat or distribution of
> Linux.
It looks cool!

As for your other message, describing the display:

First, I'm shure the display itself is a HD44780 one. Therefore you 
could connect it to the parallel port as described on the lcd4linux 
homepage, and use the HD44780 driver.

The problem is the serial-to-display interface: The command set 
described in the docs is missing two important informations:

- how do I set the cursor position? There's only a "home" command 
described. But as the LCDKBD daemon supports such a feature, you could 
find out the command by sending it to this daemon, and watch the serial 
port (connect it to another machine or another serial port).

If you can't find out this command, lcd4linux could also do a "complete 
update" every time something changes. This is bad for speed and 
performance, but as the display is 16x2 only, this wouldn't hurt that much.

- how do I define a user-defined character? This command is necessary 
for bars. I'm afraid the controller does not support this command, 
because it's used nowhere. You won't get any bars without this command.

If you find the above infos, it should be quite easy to write a driver 
for this display. You could use an existing driver as a basis, and just 
modify the low-level functions for goto(x,y) and defchar(ascii, bitmap).


bye, Michael

-- 
Michael Reinelt                                   Tel: +43 676 3079941
Geisslergasse 4                                   Fax: +43 316  692343
A-8045 Graz, Austria                          e-mail: re...@eu...