Discussion - eCCR controller - price and what's gotta be there

Genesis

Nice power specs..... the problem with power consumption is usually in the display driver chip though. I know which panel this serial driven LCD chip is using and the panel itself is only responsible about 6ma of current draw.... the rest is in the character generator/interface ICs.

Serial I/O and on-module character generation and control has to be done anyway due to the realities of I/O space on these small uP controllers, unless you want to radically increase your parts count with I/O multiplexers and such.....

There's another one that I've found that has some of the same functionality BUT has its backlight driven discretely (requiring two more wires and another I/O pin on the controller - I have plenty of the latter but the former is a PITA if you're going to remote the display from the controller itself) and it lacks a few functionality things that I really like about the one I've got now (block/blink cursor which makes data entry easy, specifically.)

However, its current draw (backlight off) is 3ma all-up - that's a hell of an improvement over 30ma!

There's a fairly significant cost to power consumption trade-off which comes into play when you start trying to optimize there, and what burns you ultimately is the solenoid and backlight. If you need neither you can come up with a micropower controller that consumes VERY little juice. Problem is, the solenoid has to be driven and most of the time people like to use the backlight!

Parallax also has a 4x20 version of that LCD with an identical command set. Very nice and inexpensive. I decided against it simply because I don't need that much real estate for display, and it roughly doubles the size of the enclosure, which makes it more expensive and bulky - and I hate bulky things on my wrists when diving.....

There's no reason the 4x20 couldn't be used though with only very minor code changes (positioning of writes); indeed I might parameter-table the locations so that it would be just a setting for 2x16 or 4x20 LCDs..... not hard to do at all.