I know that character displays like HD44780 are used widely on faxes, phones, vending machines, user panels. What about the 12864 GLCD? One place I confirmed that uses 12864 display (not sure if it is KS0108) is TI 85 calculator:
So can someone tell me why these displays got popular here? What industry is/was using these displays? Just curious.
Good question. I see many that are cheaper than 20x4 character displays.
I see some credit card swipers that use them.
Often they have a resistive touch screen on top of them.
--- bill
Maybe there are several reasons.
While I still have several devices with character LCDs, i think they become a little bit out of fashion. I do not know any cell phone which uses a character LCD. Also the cheapest phone has some nice graphical interface and funny logos to impress the customers. While a hobbyist in the past had some character LCDs from broken cable phones, todays hobbyist has a bucket with brocken cell phones, every device equiped with a graphical LCD (at least, this happens to me at the moment). Indeed i started to investigate these cell phone LCDs more closely.
As Bill said, graphics LCDs are more cheaper. No ROM required, no license fee for the bitmaps (ok, if there is any) no complex command interpreter for cursor control etc. Modern GLCDs more often use serial interfaces: This will save pins. CAPs are removed from the PCB so that companies are able to build these "display on glass" GLCDs which, i guess are very cheap in production, campared to a character LCD which requires a PCB with a lot of components. Drawback is, that i have to add some CAPs to my GLCD.
Simply spoken, complexity is removed from the device and has to be put into the microcontroller and on my own PCB, having a more cheaper LCD device at the end.
And finally: Having a dumb GLCD is more challenging to deal with for a hobbyist. Character Devices are well supported here. There are nice libraries, aldready shiped with the Arduino IDE. So, more fun with the investigation of these GLCD devices.
Oliver