Display alternatives?

[kuangeleven]

Hi All, I'm wondering what displays some of you might be using?

I'm not really happy with the 16x2 LCD I have in place at the moment: http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/produc ... cts_id=461
The refresh is pretty slow, display itself is too small to fit long song titles and it is difficult to read from a distance.

The blue on black display 16x2 LCD module looks like it might be more readable, but I guess I'm really interested in finding something similar to what is used in the squeezebox classic. http://www.logitechsqueezebox.com/produ ... assic.html

Maybe a 20x4 display with the capability of showing larger characters? Perhaps a VFD instead of an LCD? Anyone have experience with these?

I've also seen the thing where one can use a displayLink device with slugterm/openwrt: http://sven.killig.de/openwrt/slugterm_dl.html

While I think this might be an excellent option, at $100 the U70 is out of my price range. The http://sven.killig.de/openwrt/slugterm_4d.html looks cool too, but a little small.

I guess I'm looking for something more middle-of-the-road which would could be driven be an arduino or directly from say lcd4linux, slugterm or something and can display larger text readable from a distance of 6-10 feet / 2-3 meters or so.

Any suggestions?

[mightyohm]

There was a 2 line VFD display that All Electronics was selling really cheap a couple years ago. I don't know how many characters wide it was, but it would definitely be readable from a distance. It was pretty large.

I have played with 20x4 displays on the router and in my experience they are a pain to deal with due to the way they map memory onto the display. I tried to hack something together quickly, but gave up when I realized I would have to totally rework the display / scrolling code on the AVR. It's possible that my display was weird, I would still look into it if you really want 4 lines.

That squeezebox display is pretty sexy!

[richms]

4 line by 20s are not a problem, its the 4 by 40's that are - they have 2 enable lines or something (been a while) so you have to treat them as 2 displays.

I would be interested in a dot matrix display of some sort - blue and white would be the best IMO... Characters are so hard to read when scrolling I find.

[sys_spud]

I second mightyohm's suggestion on VFD display, they're very elegant. I bought two of these on ebay for $23 plus $6 US shipping (each):
http://cgi.ebay.com/Epson-serial-VFD-Di ... 19b7391277
You have to build a small simple circuit to get the right output to an arduino, which is what I originally was using it with. I'm very happy with them.

Gratuitous Action Shot:

[mightyohm]

Great looking display and a builtin serial interface? Cool!