Friday, August 10, 2012

LCDproc on Mac OS X

I had the opportunity to order some small LCD's (HD44780) at a very fair price, since I already got one in my backup-server i tried to get it working on my docked MacBook running Mac OS X (10.8). Took some time, but in the end I got it working with not too much effort.


Steps I took were:

  1. Download LCDproc source from the official website
  2. Install libusb from homebrew (brew install libusb)
  3. Install libftdi from homebrew (brew install libftdi) <-- this was needed because I used a FT245RL brekout board to connect it.
  4. Configure with "./configure --prefix=/usr/local/ --enable-drivers=all --includedir=/usr/local/include/ --enable-libftdi=yes"
  5. make -j6
  6. sudo make install
Then changed /usr/local/etc/LCDd.conf like this: (only changed/added values shown).

[server]
DriverPath=/usr/local/lib/lcdproc/
Driver=hd44780

[hd44780]
ConnectionType=ftdi
ftdi_mode=4
ftdi_line_EN=0x10
ftdi_line_RS=0x20
ftdi_line_RW=0x40

Device=/dev/tty.usbserial-A80048fE
Size=16x2

Of course, you need to have the XCode Command Line tools installed. Also I had the FTDI D2XX driver already installed, the VCP drivers will most likely conflict with libftdi.


I also got it showing my Growl notifications thanks to http://maclcd.blogspot.nl/

1 comment:

  1. Hi,

    Can you please show the schematics of your display/interface? I tried to assembly one but I don't know if I bought a bad display unit or if I fried it during assembly.

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