Pretty damn spiffy eh?

Dont forget your heatshrink :p

I use a proper heatgun to shrink my tubing but I think a hairdrier works fine.

lol! :D

Thats the power cable sorted out. Now all we gotta do is sort out the serial cable to get the data to the LCD. Wont be able to display anything interesting (unless you find a flashing cursor interesting) without that now will we? "NO!" I hear you cry ;).

Right, about this serial cable. You may have bought one from Matrix Orbital here, but if you dont have one I can help you out.

I got mine from Mappers because I forgot to get one with my MO order - do'h. All you need is a 9 pin Male to Female lead of the length you need. I bought myself a 2m one from Mappers, does the job nicely. The code for it is DD28.

Here she is with the Mappers serial cable

Both of the cables installed

OK, now that we have both the data and the power hooked up, we can start testing this baby. Lets see what she can do. I apologise in advance for any bad pics, none of them do this LCD justice, but hey, my camera is old, give it some respect :P

Now I will try and show you what this LCD is capable of, it works with almost all the software out there, and more is being programmed every minute. You could also have a go at programming it yourself, so its capable of anything really. :)

I cant possibly show you everything ( im lazy ) but Ill show you all the things I use.

First, of course, there is the brilliant LCDriver by Uller which is a simple way of configuring your LCD once and all your other apps use the data from it so that you dont have to configure each one individually.

Winamp
For my winamp stats and visualisations I use the Winamp LCD plugin from Markus Zehnder. Get it here. Looks brilliant.

The configuration tab

Pretty sweet eh?

Time
I use LCDTime which can be found here. Its made by specialK. This needs LCDriver to be installed and configured before it will work. Very simple to use.

Temperatures and various other stats
As I said before, there are so many different ones, but the following two are the ones I use regularly.

LCDCenter
Its possible to display any text you want with this app, but also had Temps, Email status, Winamp, Harddrives etc. Get it here.

This has its own driver, but you can also use LCDriver with it.

LCDSmartie
I always used to use LCDSmartie from the early days when I used parallel LCDs, but now basieP has just released a nice new version with support for the new generation of serial LCDs :D. Nice small interface, can be hidden in the system tray. Also has options to control GPOs according to various other things, e.g. temps, email etc. Get it here.

Thats it with the apps for now, I'll look at some more in my upcoming articles which will go into depth more and really see what this thing can do. There are many other lcd apps out there, check here for the latest news. Theres also a thread here with a list of LCD apps.

The GPOs
GPO stands for General Purpose Output, and this particualr LCD has 6 of them. They are outputs which can deliver upto 25mA @ 5v and are software controlled. 25mA!?!? thats not much, be that will be 'sorted' soon ;). The outputs have 2 pins, there is a positive pin, which is at a constant 5v and another pin which is at 5v when the GPO is off ( giving a potential difference of 0 ) and is it 0v when the GPO is on ( giving the stated potential difference of +5v ). The GPOs can be controlled by apps such as LCDStats and LCDSmartie and can turn on when you get new mail for example, or can turn on if a temperature goes past a certain boundary. The GPOs can prove to be very useful.

The Keypad
This LCD has the option of a 25key keypad to be connected to it. The keypad can be used to control a fair few things. It can control winamp when used with the right app, e.g. Play/Pause, Stop, Next track, Last track etc. It can also be used to turn the GPOs on and off, which is useful if you want direct hardware control of your fans.

ChriX's Final Thought
This is a very nice display, can be used for virtually anything and is supported by nearly all of the LCD Apps out there. Its very easy to setup, if you buy the right bits from Matrix Orbital, you could easily get it going in under 5mins. Its not the best LCD that MO do, and lacks some nice features that others have, e.g. it has a LED Array backlight so its not easy to change the colours, thats about the only bad thing, but then again its not the most expensive. It has more 'Mod Potential' than some of the others too. It begs to be inverted :D ( well thats another story ;) Its great value for money, the GPOs and the keypad facility are very useful, and on sale at the moment, so head over to MO and add one to your collection today.