The project described below demonstrates the usage of LCD graphical display with the help of available demo source codes.

The LCD in the first place is a tricky device, first of all you need separate power for the back light because of the higher voltage, so the author used a break-out board from www.sparkfun.com (Nokia 6100 LCD including breakout board), this board has built in a DC/DC converter for boosting the voltage, you only need one 3.3V power source.

The second issue is the control of the LCD, fortunately these mass produced displays are well documented and frequently used by hobbyist, you find a bunch of demo code for almost any type of microcontroller. The author used the demo code found on the sparkfun site, with small modifications.

Let’s see the microcontroller, some years ago the favorite AVR used by newbies was the Atmega8, which was superseded by the Atmega48/88/168, it has the same rich features, and some improvements, this was the choice of the authors too(ATmega48).

After hooking up the LCD with the microcontroller, we need some data to display, the author used his flickr account for accessing some photos on the web, you can find the free API to access the data for phyton or other high level programming languages, the pictures after downloaded, were resized, and transferred via serial port to the microcontroller which displays the image. The rendering is quite slow because the data is sent pixel by pixel to the display, but hey, at the end you have a color picture downloaded from the web and displayed on a Nokia display.

Although it sounds to be great fun to build it, if you are a beginner, try something simpler, or at least load a simple picture from your PC.

Flickr + Nokia LCD: [Link]

]]> http://www.youritronics.com/flickr-nokia-lcd/feed/ 1 http://www.youritronics.com/fetch-flickr-images-on-a-nokia-lcd/ http://www.youritronics.com/fetch-flickr-images-on-a-nokia-lcd/#comments Mon, 23 Jun 2008 17:36:06 +0000 Florin http://www.youritronics.com/?p=1183

Alex from Tinkerlog added an interesting article about fetching Flickr images on a Nokia LCD. He used a Nokia 6100 LCD including breakout board from Sparkfun. The MCU is an ATmega48, though cheap, not the best choice as he encountered some problems with the image quality. First the image is fetched from Flickr using Beej’s Python Flickr API than the image is resized and sent to the LCD. Taken to consideration the fact that this is his first LCD project we can call it a success.

Fetch Flickr Images On A Nokia LCD: [Link]