need a little starter help with 635 and lcd4linux

E

ehall

New member
I bought a 635 a while back for use with a WinXP box, but am wanting to repurpose the device to do some VMware monitoring (eg, watching the load and throughput for each virtual machine). I'm using SUSE Pro 9.3 for the host os, and the 635 is seemingly recognized by the system. lcd4linux is installed and is working with their virtual X11 driver, but I'm having a little trouble getting it to talk to the 635.

What are the lcd4linux driver settings that I should use?

Do I need to load a specific module driver, or is it already in the kernel (it appears to be)?

Can I control the little side lamps on the 635 with lcd4linux?

Thanks for the help!
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E

ehall

New member
found the device on /dev/ttyUSB0 and it also works on /dev/usb/ttyUSB0 as well

lcd4linux is working with the default crystalfontz driver, but you have to specify model 631 to get the right protocol support. The 631 is only a 2-line model, so you only get two lines of display.

lcd4linux doesn't support the buttons (according to the docs) so that and the limited display kind of make this a dead-end.

What are the preferred alternatives?
 
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E

ehall

New member
I've compiled it but am having some trouble figuring out if it's working. For example, the config docs only show max port speed of 19200 but this one is set to 115200. Lots of issues in general.
 
C

CF Mark

Administrator
ehall said:
I've compiled it but am having some trouble figuring out if it's working. For example, the config docs only show max port speed of 19200 but this one is set to 115200. Lots of issues in general.
Click to expand...
Ill have a look into this for you...

LCDProc isnt the easiest software to get working :(
 
C

CF Mark

Administrator
Oh, btw, what did you want to use the LCD for?

Displaying stats , fan control, changing settings with the buttons, etc?
 
E

ehall

New member
I want rotating panels that show information about the host os and each of the running VMware guest machines. Maybe sideways scrolling between the different host/VMs, and vertical scrolling for different info about each (cpu, ram, network i/o, etc). Don't know what I'll use the LEDs for yet but probably host warning indicators like load or temp. I don't need to control the PC or the fans but I might want to display temp/rpm in the host os pages.
 
E

ehall

New member
The author of lcd4linux was looking for help with the 635 anyway so we talked and he wrote a new drv_Crystalfontz.c and put it in the sourceforge CVS pool. I pulled it into the 10.0 source tarball and it compiled and worked with no problem, so the 635 is now working with all four lines of display. We're still talking about LED and input support but thought I'd let folks know that the 635 is working with the lcd4linux sources and will be probaby be part of whatever the next build is.
 
USB LCD Displays - Graphic and Character LCDs with a Keypad
E

ehall

New member
Took 10 minutes, not much work. Doesn't help me much either since it still doesn't support input or multiple screens or the LEDs.

Anybody know how to use lcdproc with the 635? Do I need to knock the USB serial port speed down?

Can the test635 be modified for that?
 
E

ehall

New member
Alright got it working, sort of

The support for the 635 is in the CFontzPacket.c driver module code, which [I think] only works with the 0.50 branch, with some additional tweaks.

Use CVS to pull down the 0.50 dev tree.

Copy the server/drivers/CFontzPacket.c over the server/drivers/CFontz633.c driver.

./configure --enable-drivers=all; make; make install

[edit] If the drivers aren't found, change the driver path entry in the [server] section.

Edit the /etc/LCDd.conf file and enable the CFontz633 driver (which is actually the CFontzPacket driver now) and add "model=635" to the [CFontz633] section. Set the device and speed entries to whatever is appropriate for your device (/dev/ttyUSB0 and 115200 for me).

Try it and watch the debug messages (cranking up the debug level to 4 will tell you what's going on).

If you can't read the text, try changing the "p->contrast / 20" line in the original CFontzPacket.c file to "p->contrast / 4", change the LCDd.conf so that "contrast=480" and repeat (this is described in the mailing list archives and worked for me).

I got mine working but I still have some problems with certain cells not displaying correctly (garbled or blank unexpectedly). It looks like lcdproc 0.50 is going to work for my needs but its still a ways from being cooked.
 
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