Feel free to steal, but credit being given would be appreciated. Shoot me a mail and i'll add you to the links section of my site (currently in development)
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Got my VFD in on friday, and spent a bit of my day making the cable.
VFD. man,this thing is heavy (it should be as it has two large 3/8" thick pieces of glass sealing the screen)
I put some masking tape over the screen to protect it while i worked on the VFD.
First task at hand was to add a decoupling cap between the gnd and +5v lines on the display
1uF/50V.striped leg to ground, other to +5V.
I salvaged a 2x13 pin connector from an old 486 box's parallel port connecor (Before they put them all on the motherboard). Its keyed, so there is no way for me to mess up the connection and fry my precious vfd (hey, its $160 - better be careful.) Below is the 25pin D shell connecor for the parallel port (new, but it was in my bag-o-bits. they can be had at RadioShack/RS/maplin for very cheap)
Since pins 18-25 on the parallel port are all ground, connect them all together so one only has to run a single line over to the common ground pins (all the even numbered ones up to 24 on the VFD. Cut a length of wire (see the red mark) then strip all the insulation off...
and solder the bit on...
A few moments later, following the
LCDStudio/LCDInfo/LiquidMP3] wiring (Ray you rock, but i've got the bar graph driver bug..
) The beauty of having 5000 ft of extra cat3
(yes, I did connect the ground and trim the excess wires after this shot).
(No pics of the other end - oops!)
Nothing impressive, as im having driver bug issues with the display. The noritake blinkenlights player looks really cool. I'll have to shoot some video of that when i get home (at the GFs for the weekend at the moment)
