June 17th
Bjorn Borg - "Resistance is futile - You will be assimilated. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own..."
The 84 x 48 Graphic SPI LCD has been assimilated into TI's Basic WiFi Demo program.
I have modified the program to have Terminal output also redirected to the LCD Screen.
So now when the unit is powered up the version number appears on the LCD Screen.
This makes it considerably easier to debug and development quicker.
After yesterday's dramas this has all gone smoothly.
My SPI LCD Driver has been parameterised to make it very easy to reconfigure for use with any SPI port and set of I/O pins.
In its original configuration I was using P3.5, P3.6 and P3.7 for the LCD control pins (nRST, nCS, C/D).
Since P3.5, P3.6 and P3.7 are all used by the Basic WiFi demonstration program for WiFi LED Status, I had to move these control pins as a part of the assimilation.
Rather than explicitly redefining them as hard coded values within the code I used #define statements to make it much easier.
To do this I not only #defined the control pins but also included supporting configuration register and bit values.
The task was made easier by the MSP430FRAM5739 by having two independent SPI ports.
The LCD as been assigned to USCIA1 and pins P1.0, P1.1 and P1.2 (unused LED Status indicators) allowing the existing WiFi hardware and software to remain unaltered.
My SPI LCD Driver is supported by a small ASCII code to graphic bitmap font creator to conserve memory space.
It is only designed to generate upper case and basic symbols.
I've divided the 84x48 pixel display into larger 6x8 addressable character blocks to fit in the 5x7 font with appropriate intercharacter spacing.
This provides a 14 char x 6 line character display. I've added cursor addressing functions to place characters in the desired character block location.
I am now in the process of getting data that has been sent to the CCS3000 to display it on the LCD screen.
Why am I doing this? Well, not just for debugging, it is to enable the incoming Twitter message to be displayed.
(Well at least 84 or so of the maximum 140 character Twitter message length).