ATMega32 KS0108 128x64 Graphical LCD

 A monochrome graphical LCD is useful whenever the system needs to display any graphical data or symbols rather than pure characters. Most conventional graphical LCD module uses the parallel port 68000 data interface. It's very easy to program using direct micro-processor I/O addressing but it requires time and a large number of wires to connect the MCU and the parallel port LCD module on breadboard.

Atmega32 Test Board With PICKit2 ICSP

 

This controller chip was manufactured in early 2000s. It's popular in industrial control system with user interface and data visualization. Currently any similar display modules are in use but They uses modern compatible LCD controllers. Modern controllers have more features especially low power and additional build-in fonts (Chinese chips). 

I bought an RJ12864J-1 128x64 monochrome dot matrix display fro E bay a decade ago. At that time it was expensive, costed around 15USD. This GLCD module had two KS0108 controller chips and its common driver chips.

Front Panel

 

I sprayed acrylic paint for the back panel of this module to prevent corrosion.

 

Back Panel

 

Programming and interfacing for this GLCD was very easy at that time since it has only a little amount of LCD commands. Those commands are very similar to other Graphical LCD controller chips. There are a lot of examples for this GLCD from various C compilers such as Mikroelectronika, CCS PICC, CodeVision AVR, etc. CCS PICC compiler has a lot of demo programs including this LCD module. 

Since this GLCD module has one 8-bit port, power supply and bias, and control pins. The MCU uses more than 8 I/O pins to interface with. If we need to reduce the pins requirement we can use MikroC compiler. It has a library that use an SPI or I2C interface connects to an MCP23X17 port expanding chip. This chip will control the overall data transfer with the GLCD module. 

Currently Arduino could do almost every electronic stuffs. However I still use a raw C programming written in AVR LibC because it's very fast and effective. I tried to test this graphical LCD with some monochrome bitmap images and texts using an ATMega32 chip.

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