LCD Smartie official USB hardware powered by gglabs

Submitted by GG on Thu, 06/27/2013 - 22:30

LCD Smartie official hardwareWe are proud to announce that gglabs was chosen by the LCD Smartie team to design a custom USB interface for text displays specifically designed for LCD Smartie. The result of our collaboration is the LCD Smartie official hardware. Beside purchasing the most advanced USB based LCD interface on the market, your money will serve good cause as part of the profits will go to the LCD smartie developers.

Features

LCD Smartie official hardware PCB

  • Support for all HD48770 compatible displays
  • Software control for both backlight and contrast
  • Full Speed USB 2.0 Compliant
  • True USB device (i.e. not a USB to COM port bridge)
  • Fully Plug and Play (device driver is detected and installed automatically by windows without user intervention)
  • Display driver included in the latest LCD Smartie distribution (DS00HIDA.dll)
  • Low power consumption (less than 100mW without backlight)
  • User selectable lcd2usb emulation to support legacy software
  • Linux support (LCD4Linux and LCDproc)

PCB back side

Note

The boards are shipped in LCDSmartie native mode. To enable the lcd2usb emulation required by LCD4linux and LCDproc download the ds00_cli below, uncompress it (compile if necessary) and issue the following command (note the capital L):

ds00_cli L

The display will reboot and be in lcd2usb. To switch it back to Native LCDSmartie mode issue the the following command:

ds00_cli W

Green Display

Attachment Size
ds00_cli.tar.gz 14.43 KB
Filed under

User should do a make clean before doing anything. There is a pre-built binary in the zip and it may not be compatible. (maybe make a release directory; release/`arch`/ds00_cli)

Error message: Could not find/open DS00
Either the device is not plugged in, or you have a permissions problem. Create a udev/rules.d/ file or re-run the command as sudo.

Worth making a make install command

./ds00_cli L required a hotplug, the device didn't reboot on the version I just tried.

When switching firmware to Windows or Linux Mode, Control Out error -7 is expected as the device is going to time out and not return data on the control transfer.