Copyright 2003 by Michael Sweet

Introduction | Changes in v1.1 | Quick Start | Customization | Download | Reporting Problems

Introduction

flcdsim is a graphical simulator for the Scott Edwards Electonics, Inc. Integrated Serial LCD Module, ILM-216. It simulates all aspects of the 2-line, 16-character LCD display including the 4 buttons that are supported by the module, the piezo buzzer, and the communications delay induced by the slow serial interface. flcdsim runs another program with the stdin/stdout/stderr files redirected to flcdsim, allowing you to develop applications that communicate with an ILM-216 without an ILM-216 on your system, or just to test the interface without disturbing the LCD that is already being used.

flcdsim was developed in under a day to allow me to develop and test an LCD interface for a CUPS project at my company, and is provided with ABSOLUTELY NO SUPPORT OR WARRANTY under the terms of the GNU GPL.

Changes in v1.1

flcdsim v1.1 makes cosmetic changes to the LCD font, cursor, and backlight effect to more closely simulate the appearance of the ILM-216.

Quick Start

You'll need the FLTK library (http://www.fltk.org/), an ANSI compliant C++ compiler, and some version of UNIX or MacOS X. Microsoft Windows is not supported due to Windows lack of support for select() on ordinary file descriptors.

Once you have extracted the source archive, run the following commands to make and install the program:

    ./configure
    make
    make install

Once installed, just run:

    flcdsim program args

where "program" is the program you want to test and "args" is a list of any command-line arguments you want to pass into the program.

Using flcdsim

Under normal operation, flcdsim will display all output from your program and will respond to button clicks just as the real LCD. Click on the Reset button to restart your program and reset the LCD to power-on defaults.

The baud rate, debug window, and button labels in the flcdsim can be customized via the mouse. These customizations are remembered between runs for your convenience.

Click on the 2400 or 9600 buttons to set the simulated baud rate of the serial interface. flcdsim throttles the output to the selected baud rate so you can properly test the speed of your LCD user interface.

Click on the Debug button to toggle the display of the debug text drawer at the bottom of the window. This drawer shows all of the output your program sends to the stderr file.

Click the right mouse button on any of the buttons to change the text labels. A pop-up menu will be displayed to change the label to text you enter or reset the label to the button number. Labels may use any FLTK symbol string in addition to plain text, allowing for arrows, etc.:

• @< - left arrow
• @> - right arrow
• @2< - up arrow
• @2> - down arrow

Other symbols can be found in the FLTK Programmers Manual.

Download

The current version of flcdsim is available here:

• 1.1 Source Code (62k, .tar.gz)
• 1.1 Linux RPM (414k)

Reporting Problems

Please report all problems to "mike AT easysw DOT com" or to the FLTK mailing lists or newsgroups at:

    http://www.fltk.org/newsgroups.php

I'm typically swamped with email, so I'll ask for your patience in advance.