I started this as a boredom killer when I was having a clear out - Had a couple of these knocking around as spares in a drawer but finding an old post from Canonman about the BD1 displays prompted me to have a play with these. I got a bit engrossed and obsessed with it after a day of coding and now after 3 days I have a decent demonstration program knocked up and I think I know what most of the controls and features are- The display used is the standard 16 digit 7x5 dot matrix display used in most scorpion 4 fruit machines, well the big smiley cab ones anyway (lol a bit of DOND being made useful for once) . Im driving it from a PC parralel port using windows XP and the inpout32.dll thats availible online.
Im pretty happy with my demonstration software, this is perhaps the beginnings of a bigger project and I have a lot of hidden elements in my program for testing all sorts of ways of using the display- I have only shown the features I think are used in a fruit machine!
The software is a stand alone exe so I could probs easily add a clock routine to the program to show the time and date on the display and then it could sit on my table. But for the minute, I can type messages and send them over to the alpha, or select the demo mode to show an "attract " message routine.
Have a gander at the video, I will explain more in a while - You can even make up your own character set for these things ...
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