Noob question

Zeropanic

Hi there,

The wife said I needed a hobby so this is what I picked. I'm just starting out and the BASIC Stamp looked like a great place to begin as I putzed around with Basic in the 80s.

Would anyone know how to make a display out of these puppies? www.datasheetcatalog.com/datasheets_pdf/D/L/G/7/DLG7137.shtml They are made by Siemens with their own built in charachter generator. I "rescued" a good lot of these from the inside of a tape libary silo. These originally plugged in a control board (which I still have) that housed several of the LED matrixes as well as some LEDs that showed the status of the tape drives (online, offline, error, etc).

Any help or suggestions would be welcomed even if it is a tall task that may require too much HP than the BS2 can put out.

Many Thanks

Franklin

Looks to me like you put a high on the data pins that corespond to the letter you want and take wr and cs low to load. I have something similar from siemens designed for the first generation digital watches ( a DL1414T module)

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- Stephen

Mike Green

It looks like you can connect all the data lines (D0-D6) and the write enable line (WR) in parallel and use the chip select (CS) to select the character you want to change. The Stamp has enough power, but does have a limited number of I/O pins. You could use a 74HC595 serial to parallel shift register as an I/O expander and the SHIFTOUT statement in the BS2 to transfer data to it with one 74HC595 providing the 8 lines for D0-D6 and WR yet using only three I/O pins. Another 74HC595 per set of 8 displays could be used for the CS lines and these would be daisy-chained in series as needed for a total of 6 I/O pins.