Tag Archives: text

LED Moving Message Display using AVR ATmega8

An interesting project that can be done using Microcontroller is a LED message scroll er. It teaches you a quite lot of things. So I decided to make one. I made the hardware design modular and cascadeble That means the whole display is made up of several 15×7 modules. Each module has everything to drive 15×7 led matrix which includes a ULN2003 row driver IC and two shift register IC to drive the 15 columns. Data is loaded serially into the 15 columns. and multiplexing is done along the row. Video Demo The 15×7 Smart LED Board. The 15×7 Smart LED Board.   Schematic. The Controller Board. Any cheap AVR MCU like a ATmega8 can be used to control this board (also up to 4 such boards which give a total of 60px by 7px display). We are using our low cost development board as the controller to the LED matrix board. This board can be purchased at a price as low as Rs. 249 including the MCU ! So wiring this project is a matter of ten minutes ! Low Cost AVR Board   Whole Setup. Connecting The Display Module with Devboard. PIN Diagram.   PIN No PIN Name Devboard PIN 1 GND GND 2 N/C   3 +5V IN +5V out 4 N/C   5 Serial Data In […]

Handling Text and Fonts in Graphic LCD

ProGFX supports advance function to draw text on graphical LCD screen. ProGFX support multiple fonts, fonts with variable width characters, absolute pixel based positioning, and utility function to get the dimension of text in any specified font. The last feature is used to cleanly position text relative to other graphic and text objects on screen. So lets get started. First you will need a tool that will help convert any Windows Font to ProGFX compatible format. Thanks to Mr. F. Maximilian Thiele we have a great tool called Font Creator. You can download it from here. Download GLCD Font Creator It is a Java application so you need the Java Runtime to use it. Launch the app using start.bat file. You will get a screen similar to this. Font Creator Main Screen From file menu select "New Font" , and configure the New Font Dialog as follows. New Font Dialog Name = Arial12 Import Font = Arial Size =12 And click ok. From Export Menu Select "Export Font", Give it the name "Arial12.h" while saving. Create a Atmel Studio Project with GFX Support. The steps are given in the following tutorials. Hello World Project with Atmel Studio 6. Setting up ProGFX Project using AVR Studio. Name the AVR Studio Project as "FontDemo". Open the project folder in Windows Explorer (or […]