2 questions - NKK Smartswitch with propeller

Joms

I am fairly new with the propeller and just going through the chapters in the manual.· One of my first project will be to try and get a NKK Smartswitch to work with the stamp.· Two questions come up when doing this...

1.· Is anyone familier with the older generation of the buttons?· I have 5 of them that have the button on pins 1 & 2, and LCD control on pins 5-14.· All of the documention I can find is for the new units which use pins 1-14.· I have dual color buttons with standard resolution LCD on the buttons.

2.· Has anyone ever used these before?· I see that basically the LCD has little smarts with the exception of a shift register.· Basically the stamp will have to tell every pixel of the LCD to be either on/off via the data in utilizing the shift register.· What I am wondering is, is there a function in the propeller that does this for me, so I don't have to hard code the clock and every bit of data to display a charactor.· When the book says the first half of the ROM is dedicated to 256 charactors, is this what it is for?

Any and all information would be helpful in this long adventure I am working on.

Thanks!

Mike Green

There's no built-in function to drive a shift register, but the "BS2 Compatibility Library" which is downloadable from the Propeller Object Exchange has most of the Stamp functionality in the form of subroutine calls. Have a look at it. It has a routine like the SHIFTOUT statement for the Stamps that will drive the shift register.

The ROM does have a display font in it. It's for an 8 x 16 character cell. You could write a routine that would read and reduce this for smaller character cells, but the result would probably require some tweaking for good readability.