Jump to content


Photo
- - - - -

MPU Mecca - Working out how to use a Bellfruit alpha display


  • Please log in to reply
No replies to this topic

#1 MPU Mecca

MPU Mecca

    Senior Member

  • Regulars
  • 10806 posts

Posted 07 May 2016 - 07:18 PM

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 ...

 


View the full article




0 user(s) are reading this topic

0 members, 0 guests, 0 anonymous users