In my continuing quest to procrastinate actual construction of the machine, I took some time this week to tinker around with my LCD module. It has a somewhat complicated command interface for configuring the display properties and uploading data, and a lengthy data sheet that I found pretty mind-numbing. I decided to jury-rig something to display a test message, by storing a sequence of LCD commands in a ROM, and using a counter to cycle continuously through the ROM contents. Figuring out the right sequence of commands and control signals took some fiddling, but after a night’s experimentation… voila!

Oh wow, what’s that there on the LCD display… it’s “Hello World”! Or actually no, it’s “dHello World”, but that’s close enough. The actual command sequence causes the display to continuously overwrite itself with copies of “Hello World”, and my photo just happened to catch it there.

In actual BMOW-related news, this weekend I ordered what I hope is the last batch of parts I need to construct the machine: a few assorted sockets, resistors, and capacitors. I’ve already assembled what I hope is the final list of parts for my wire-wrap board, so my next step is to engage in the Tetris-like task of optimally fitting all the components onto the limited space of the board, while also accounting for the maximum possible length of various external connectors. Hopefully everything will fit, otherwise I’m going to look pretty stupid.