Hi All,

I saw this posted earlier by someone else but there was no response so I thought I would give you all a second chance...

Is anyone using a VFD under knoppmyth / MythTV / Linux (any of the three) yet?

What do you use to program it?

Thanks for any replies,
jpummill

I remember seeing a thread on the myth mailing list (I think users) with a guy who said he had one working with mythtv. Search the list for lcd/vfd.

Being my myth box is in a closet, I don't really have need for a lcd/vfd.

I suppose this means I'm not using one, but what is a vfd? very fast deterioration? very fragile disk? volume floating demark? oh well enough of that.

vacuum florescent display .. Sort of dot-matrix like display .. very nice.

hmm so what's the deal with it, does it require some sort of special input? if not it shouldn't be too hard to get working, and if it supports probing for refresh capabilities it should be a breeze.

I believe it uses a different controller than the lcds. I think it's just a matter of sending the data in the format the vfd needs and all is fine. I don't need/want one, so I'm only partially paying attention

On a somewhat related note, a guy at work interfaced a vfd to a PIC microcontroller .. Pretty cool stuff..

well it just seems a bit odd, I can't imagine what type of signal it is wanting, other than dvi, vga, or svid all of which a computer has no problems providing (even in linux) of course there's still rgb, but that's more or less vga just has different connectors, and those cables can be had pretty cheap. The only other option I can think of is component like hdtv, which requires a vga(rgb) to component(ypbrsomehtingorother) converter.

The VFD is similar to an LCD but is not controlled by the VGA port. It is either connected to the parallel, or the USB ports.

You can use them to display information about your system (CPU load, Memory usage, uptime, etc...) also in a mythTV setup, they could be used to show the current song or channel, or what DVD is being played. It would be most useful to display song info while your TV is off.

Here are a couple links if anyone is interested...

LCD Control (might be used for VFD also): http://lcdproc.omnipotent.net/index.php3
Matrix Orbital (A distributer of VFD's): http://www.matrixorbital.com/pages/products.asp?CatID=2

Let me know what you guys think...

ohhh those things. well your first post is to the linux program to control them, so someone has obviously gotten them to work in linux.

as a matter of fact lcdproc is available in debian unstable tree so you should be able to apt-get update apt-get install lcdproc. However the lmsensor modules and others that have to be built into the kernel are a different story.

however you should be able to display cpu, memory, etc load without lmsensors. You'll just have to rebuild the kernel if you want cpu temp fan speed, case temp or stuff like that.

Mainly wanting to get MP3 name, and play time... Or Movie name and play time...

i was looking in to this my self, and something called mythlcd comes up (lcd and vfd seems treated the same)
http://www.gossamer-threads.com/archive ... y_P104944/

and i did find a link at one point with pictures of what it would show,
as for useing it i havnt gotten a lcd or a vfd as of yet
hope this helps

_________________
Kaziya

HTPC:

Asus Motherboard A7V8X-X
AMD Athlon XP 2500+ (333FSB)
256MB DDR PC2700
Nvidia Geforce 3 Ti 200
WinTV-PVR-250MCE
Logitech wireliss MXDuo (keyboard and mouse)
Ati Remote Wonder