[time-nuts] ko4bb monitor

Arthur Dent golgarfrincham at yahoo.com
Sat Jan 23 00:19:46 UTC 2010





The Thunderbolt display unit fluke.l is selling is a Icruze
display module by Monster 

that he apparently just reprogrammed. When it is powered up
there is a message that 

says No1Electric.com (one of his businesses) then it starts
displaying messages from 

the Thunderbolt. 
It works quite well displaying the time on the top line every
second 

and T-bolt status messages on the bottom line changing
every 2 seconds. There is a 

blue backlight that give good readability. The connections
are +5, GND, and RS-232 

data in. 

 

 Amazon has these
displays available for $2.50 or less, apparently they weren't a big 

seller and they are dumping them. You can check them
out at:

(http://www.amazon.com/Monster-Display-MPC-FX-LCD-UM/dp/B0007LZGHO).


 I bought one through
Amazon to check it out and the one I got uses a different chip 

than the one I bought from fluke.l. There is an Atmel
ATtiny26L 8-bit AVR 

microcontroller with 2K bytes flash memory on the one I just
bought and there is a 

185 page PDF application manual for that chip available at: 

http://www.atmel.com/dyn/resources/prod_documents/doc1477.pdf
, 

if you want to check it out. Fluke’l’s unit runs off +5V but
the unit I just got has a micro  

SMT +5V 3-terminal regulator and was designed to run off +12
(probably 7-20 range).

 

I would expect that someone with programming experience
could also make this unit 

into an inexpensive display to mount on the front panel
of the Z3801.  

                                                          
-RJB




      


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