To people who were asking about different backlight colors:
Board designed to use Amber backlight only with LED connected in series - see schematics
You can't use RGB backlight since it has a different connections
You can try to use WHITE backlight, but you will have to make some trace changes to convert serial connection to parallel. Serial LED connection will requre 6V that board does not have. I don't have a white backlight to test.
Here is another question that I want to answer in public forum:
Why schematics shows pull up resistors for every button, but they are not mounted on PCB?
Because Atmega microcontroller has internal pull-up resistors the can be activated via code.
Sample code shows how to enable them.
We added PCB pads since the same LCD can be used for other projects that may not have pull-up resistors.
10K resistors can be easily added in this case.
I still have few devices available if someone wants them.
How many pins of the Arduino does one of these shield use?? Are there any available pins?? Specifically, does it use pin 9-12 that the ethernet shield require?
Yes, it uses 9-11 and13 because it has SPI bus.
SPI pins D11 and D13, that can be shared with Ethernet
Pin 12 (MISO) is not used - LCD has one way traffic.
Control pins are on D9 and D10 (CS and A0 signals)
Buttons connected to D2-D5.
Just a follow-up on compatability with Ethernet Module:
I was told by one of the customers that connector clearance issue can be easily avoded by using an extra set of stackable headers between Ethernet Shield and this LCD.
This will put Ethernet and LCD boards about 18mm apart.
At this point we don't have Ethernet shield to test this solution.
Extra headers can be purchased from one of resellers
We will have LCD shield with headers and modified pin 10 connection next week.
I am sure DOGXL160 can be used with libraries after some modifications in 4-wire 8 bit SPI mode and possibly in 2 wire SPI 8 bit mode - Unfortunately I don't have this LCD to try.
If someone wants to donate LCD then I can try to get it going.
Probably should ask library developer Oliver Kraus if he is planning to add DOGXL160 in a near future.
Also each pixel uses 2 bits instead of 1 that will change SPI routine also.
I was looking for a way to handle pushbuttons with less inputs
Currently it uses 4 digital pins D2-D5 - one per each button
I made a prototype that returns pushbutton state via SPI with every LCD SPI write that will allow D2-D5 pins to be used for something else.
It will require a simple code modification.
Unfortunately current PCBs I have can't accomodate an additional small SPI controller, but we may implement it in future hardware designs.
For people who were asking about SPI keypad described above:
At this point I am not planning to make it in a near future because of cost associated with PCB manufacturing
But I am working to prepare information with "how to" if you want to do it yourself.
Update on compatablity with Ethernet shield:
After extensive testing we found that there is a simple way to make this shield compatible with Ethernet based shield:
To provide clearance with Ethernet connector we found tall pin headers that allow to stay 1-2mm above ethernet connector
CS pin D10 can be simply moved to D8 with a little solid jumper
Pin D4 that used by a button and needed for SD card can be moved to D7 with a solid jumper
We tested LCD/keypad in this configuaration with Ethernet+SD tutorial form ladyada and it works great: for the test we redirected some serial port traffic to LCD. http://www.ladyada.net/learn/arduino/ethfiles.html
Edit 3/5/2011: Modified shields for Ethernet/SD caompatablity are available! Few un-modifed shields are still available - they are great is you don't need Ethernet combo.
Oliver and I also added future functionality that allows keypad data to be sent via SPI back to the Arduino
This future design will use onboard ATTINY261 for flexibility and allow A0 / CS selection from available 4 pins: D7-D10.
I am goning to publish hardware and the code, but it requires a new PCB that we did not make yet, may be some time in a future.