LCD Display
Me and some of my friends wanted to have our own LCD displays that show cool and geeky stuff. So we did our own LCD's with some help of google.

This display shows my current Work Units (WU) that I have done in the SETI@Home project.
Not that many components to get this work.
A helping hand can come in place.
Display in place.
A good thing to keep in mind when you solder the 25 pin D-sub, is to put another d-sub in the connector. This prevents the pin's to move, because when you solder the pin's they get worm and they will probly melt the plastic that hold them in place.
I used this predrilled plated to put all components on. It's nice so you dont need to make your own circetboard. It may not be good looking, but it works.
From the paralell port (25 D-sub) you need 13 wires. I dident have a cable with 13 wires in it so I used an old TP cable or two to be exact. One TP cable contains 8 wires so if I take two I get 16 witch is more than enough.
Click here to get a bigger blueprint

The two Trimpot's controle the light intenety and the contrast.

Pick +5V and Ground from one of the conectors that you normaly put in a harddrive or CD.
OK, so what do you need to make your own LCD display working?

I orded the LCD display from AD-Teknik
LCD-display, 2x16 caracters, backgroundlit, Model: OM1621-GSS - 80 SKr + taxes

The rest of the stuff I orded came from Elfa
Name:  -  Order Nr:  -  Price:
Trimpot 10k ohm  -  64-366-87  -  5,72 SKr
Trimpot 100 ohm  -  64-365-05  -  5,72 SKr
Resistor 18k ohm  -  60-106-49  -  2,88 SKr
Stiftdon DSUB  -  44-055-77  -  12,70 SKr + taxes and PP

There are sevral programs out there to controle the LCD with. I used this program Smartie this program can do alot. Here is a compleat list of thing you can show.
 
 
 
 
 
Here you can see the cabel coming in that is going to be attached to the 5V "hard drive cable".

The 5V goes in to the tape, and comes out as the green wire that goes up to the display.
The ground cable goes down to the corner in the bottom of this picture.
 
Here comes some bad pictures of my display
Free memory and CPU load, but with SETI running it's always on 100%
Date and uptime on my computer.
Time and a message that scroll, saying something like. Yeah it's cool and I can build on for you if you pay me big money.
Free disk space on c: and d:
CNN news top row, Toms Hardware new bottom row.
My work place. You can never have to many monitors.
Here comes some images from my friend Jukka
This is Jukkas LCD.
LCD show if there are any new mail on the server.
Top row is "live" news from CNN.
Second row is the date.
Jukkas progress in the SETI@Home project.
Also doing some advertising for our fine SETI team.
News and time.
Here comes some images from my friend Öberg
Click here to see more of Öbergs pictures.