NJU6676 GLCD Driver.... Worth a try?

[stryd_one]

Hi all,

I have found a GLCD driver which seems like it may be very well suited to midibox apps. I've spent quite some time checking this out oevr the last week but would love to get some input from those of you in the know....

OK so here's a little story ;) This is going somewhere...

Short version: NJU6676 in serial mode seems very similar to PCD8544, TK's favourite driver, and the displays that use it are awesome.

I was playing around porting the PCD8544 driver to C wrapper compatibility (see my recent request for some help with perl )

TK's notes on this screen pointed me to this sourceforge page

While there, I thought "Maybe there are other screens like this one, TK really likes the driver, but I want a nice looking one with a backlight"

This led me to the Nokia 7110 LCD which uses the SED1565 driver IC. I checked it out, and it looks to function in almost identical fashion to the PCD screen in the other nokias... Rather nice. This IC is now called the S1D15605... here's a datasheet

Alas, the 7110 is quite popular, it's also known as 'the matrix phone', so it's not cheap... So I went searching for another display that uses the IC, and read about the Optrex 323 which again is very similar... It used another SED15xx IC. There was a mention of the same SED IC on this forum and TK seemed optimistic, so I thought I should keep going on this little journey.

Again, I see the name optrex... so I go to visit their site again, despite having been there already and not finding the 323. While I was there, I saw these STEP Line of STN Displays which have a huge contrast ratio, and I immediately thought that they might be a suitable replacement for the PLEDs we all love but can't buy.

Turns out that they use the NJU6676 IC (Datasheet (PDF)) and as you can see from this document,

Function tables (NJU6676 vs. S1D15605 ) they use almost identical command structures.

This little beauty and it's other colours are about USD$30-35, which is pretty cheap, and they will run  in parallel mode like the KS0108, or in serial mode like the PCD8544... Which makes me wonder if maybe they might be almost as high-performance as the PCD8544 screens (I say 'almost' because the addressing uses 1 more bit for the larger sizes and the timings require 50ns more).... Maybe we could connect a few of these to one core without performance impact?

So what do you think guys? I've done about as much homework as I can here :) Heres the PCD8544 datasheet for your reference...

[me=stryd_one]stands back and looks at the smart guys for answers :)[/me]

[Sasha]

Well, I`m not the one that`s going to give you some answers but I would really like to see that display on my boxes and quit endless quest for those PLEDs. This seamed realy good substitution with high contrast ratio, and it is graphical which is plus. Thanks Stryd. 

[stryd_one]

TK, I know that you probably don't have time to check this IC out, but I wonder if perhaps you could give a very short description of what it is about the PCD8544 IC that you like so much?

I know it has the vertical orientation of the bytes (like this http://www.ucapps.de/mbhp/mbhp_glcd_vertical.gif), so addressing is done in pages, and the X address automatically increments after a write... Is there something else that makes it so special?

PS, Thanks for your work on v1.9e man :)

[TK.]

I like the PCD8544 because of the performance (see http://www.midibox.org/forum/index.php?topic=2169.0) and the possibility to service multiple displays from the LCD port of the core module (thanks to the serial lines)

Best Regards, Thorsten.

[stryd_one]

OK well we certainly can do multiple displays from there with the 6676's serial IC, and having checked the timings I think that it should be good...

I hope someone could give it a critical look before I go and spend a bunch of dough an a few? My primary concerns are electronic right now (voltages etc) and I'm crap at that stuff.

Thank in advance midiboxers!