Advice sought for a project I am starting.

Using Arduino Project Guidance
1

Hey guys,

Over the past week I have been mapping out the controls of a rather ancient rs232 remote control for a piece of audio equipment. using port monitoring software etc I now know what each control sends in terms of messages etc.

The device has 6 faders, 24 buttons and can display 48 ASCII Characters split into 1 lcd of 2x12 chars and the other 1x24 chars.
The remote also has a stereo db level indicator made up of 2 rows of 16 leds.

I want to re-create the device using arduino and so far I have come up with this..

PROBLEM 1
The 6x faders are easy enough without even needing a mux (I think, at least on the ProMini) these vales can be read in, mapped from 0 -255 and the output of each would need to be converted to HEX and have the corresponding control byte prepended to it's value before being spat out on the serial bus.

PROBLEM 2
The 24 buttons I think will be somewhat more of a challenge, I'm wondering if there are keypad or scanning options I could try for this as there are not 24 inputs available..

PROBLEM3
As I mentioned above, there are 2 screens in the device, a 2x12 at the top and a 1x24 at the bottom. I believe these screens are chained in some way because If i send more than 24 characters to the 1st display they will overspill onto the bottom (1x24) display

The commands come over the rs 232 bus like this
each message of text begins with <00> and ends in <03>
so a full 24 character message would look as follows
00 74 68 69 73 20 69 73 20 61 20 74 77 65 6e 74 79 66 6f 75 72 63 68 61 72 03

but if this message were longer, how would I want to think about spilling over onto the next screen?

I guess these are 3 large questions that maybe I should split up. I just wanted to get this all out in context.

thanks, and look forward to hearing opinions.
Brad

2

PROBLEM 1
The 6x faders are easy

That's a problem?

PROBLEM 2
The 24 buttons I think will be somewhat more of a challenge, I'm wondering if there are keypad or scanning options I could try for this as there are not 24 inputs available..

There are on a Mega.

PROBLEM3
As I mentioned above, there are 2 screens in the device, a 2x12 at the top and a 1x24 at the bottom. I believe these screens are chained in some way because If i send more than 24 characters to the 1st display they will overspill onto the bottom (1x24) display

Why is this a problem?

but if this message were longer, how would I want to think about spilling over onto the next screen?

You said that happens automatically. What is there to think about?

3

firstly, all things are 'problems' if you don't know how to solve them immediatley, right? that's what solutions are for. :wink:

Thanks for the note about the mega, I'll take a look at that.

the messages spill over to the next display on the original unit. but I am talking about re-creating the original unit using an arduino.
The arduino wont know, without telling it how to do so, how to 'spill' the extra characters to teh next display.
that's what my 'problem' is there.. :wink:

4

The arduino wont know, without telling it how to do so, how to 'spill' the extra characters to teh next display.
that's what my 'problem' is there..

I'm failing to see what the problem is. You know how many characters there are. You know how many fit on a screen. Print the first n characters on line 1 of screen 1. Print the next n characters on line 2 of screen 1. Print whatever is left on the second screen.