LCD optimizations and additions

Tue, Oct 25, 2011

One of my first posts contains a LCD prototype. Today I needed LCD functionality and made some optimizations and additions to the LCD prototype.

Speed up

In the LCD3Wire library, I removed two delays:

131c131
<   //delay(1);
---
>   delay(1);
155c155
<   //delayMicroseconds(1);
---
>   delayMicroseconds(10);

This gives a good speed increase when using the LCD3Wire library. Furthermore, reading this post (http://solar-blogg.blogspot.com/2009/02/displaying-custom-5×8-characters-on.html) I copied the code to the Arduino and displayed my own custom character (using the LCD3Wire library)

lcd.commandWrite(0x40);
lcd.print(0b00000);
lcd.print(0b00100);
lcd.print(0b00010);
lcd.print(0b11111);
lcd.print(0b00010);
lcd.print(0b00100);
lcd.print(0b00000);
lcd.print(0b00000);
lcd.cursorTo(1,0);
lcd.print(0x00);

And another great LCD speedup trick by designer2k2 on the Arduino forums is to avoid using lcd.cursorTo. Instead use his direct positioning code

http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1240088162

lcd.commandWrite(0x80);                //Line=1, Cursor 0
lcd.commandWrite(0xC0+val);            //Line=2, Cursor val
lcd.commandWrite(0x94+7);              //Line=3, Cursor 7
lcd.commandWrite(0xD4);                //Line=4, Cursor 0