In reply to:

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Sounds very cool, Mike. A few questions, since I arrived late to the party over in the Projects forum.

1. In your best estimation, how much of a usable display would be expected from a 115,200 baud connection? I don't expect Toby's visuals on the remote display, that's of course way too much bandwidth... But what were *you* planning on putting on the remote display?
2. Are these displays small enough that they could be mounted in the dashboard, kind of like Hugo's little "mini-me" display thingie from a few months ago? Or even on the windshield up near the rear view mirror? That'd be SWEET.
3. I'm guessing that using this precludes the use of GPSapp or anything else that uses the serial port, right? Damnit why didn't the empeg guys think of adding a second COM port for the car???
4. I don't know how much time I am going to have this summer, but emphatic is already doing a lot of work to read the song data, including current track time, playlist length, etc... All things that would be good candidates to find their way to a remote display. Seems like it'd be a nice place for this kind of code to live... How complex is the communication protocol? If it's not too heavy of a coding task, maybe I could throw something in...

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Good questions...
1. Personally, I planned to simply use mine for kinda a HUD. I drive a Mini Cooper, and the radio is viewable by the driver, but it's way off to the right hand side. So, I'm putting mine just in front and to the bottom of my Tachometer, which is mounted on the steeringwheel. Since I don't need the visulations right in front of me, I was going to simply use my display to show the current song playing. Title, Artist, Year, Album.. all the generic stuff, then maybe a few fields that I use custom-like.
[Edit: Oh, the other reason I was going for text-only was because the VFD does not have gray-shading. It's either ON or OFF. I spent about a week messing with a small program I wrote that read the screen's display, and gave me the output either 'ON' or 'OFF', and adjusted the levels, and no matter which setting I put it at, Menus and aliased text was rather hard to read. (The visuals, however, didn't look too bad..)
2. These displays are friggin' TINY. At least, the one I plan on using (GW128x32C-K610A) has a viewable display area of roughly 1in high by 4in wide. The entire VFD board is 1.5in high by 5in wide.. Same dot resolution used by the Empeg, just higher DPI.
3. Actually, I've been thinking about that. I don't know enough of the GPSapp to anser completely, but if the GPSapp does NOT need commands sent *TO* the GPS, then it wouldn't be difficult to just plug in a small serial 'Y' cable and cut the RX leads in it to the GPS, and on my little PCB, cut one trace. That way inbound to the Empeg comes FROM the GPS, and outbound goes To the VFD..
4. It is pretty darn simple. In fact, upon powerup, the VFD defaults to having the cursor in the upper left-hand side. For characters simply send the ASCII code. (Straight Text). The manual says that the cursor will 'wrap' after it hits the end of the line, although I haven't tested it yet. (Will it move down a line? Will it cut off the last character if it can't fit? etc etc.) Other commands are usually preluded by a 'command' character (ASCII < 0x20), and then the values to that command. Quite, quite imple. The VFD dosn't return anything except "R" on powerup/reset, and "E" on command error.

Of note, also, the VFD is standard color, however, they do sell filters for it, as I'm sure Darkstorm's gels would work just as well...

Me.