Re: New Driver: picolcdgraph (Mini-box.com picoLCD 256x64 Sideshow)

On 26.02.2012 21:33, Laurence Withers wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I've recently completed a driver for the picoLCD 256x64 Sideshow display
> available from Mini-box.com:
>
>   http://www.mini-box.com/picoLCD-256x64-Sideshow-CDROM-Bay
>
> This is actually a 256x64 graphical display. The driver uses a 6x8 font which
> I derived from the t6963 driver to give a 42x8 character display. It also
> supports very nice looking horizontal and vertical bars! A lot of the code
> was derived by looking at the existing picolcd driver (which could not be
> reused, as it is too different) and the lcd4linux driver for this display. I
> have of course preserved copyright/license information in submission. A lot
> of this work seems to come from Nicu Pavel who I have added to CC.
>
> I originally developed my driver against v0.5.3 which is I know bad practice,
> but it's what my company are currently using. The submitted patch below is
> against CVS and I have verified operation of the driver with the CVS version.
> That said, there are two post-0.5.3 changes which I think need to be
> considered by me: the (possible) switch to libusb-1.0, and the consolidation
> of the 5x8 font.
>
> For now, I'd like any feedback on this driver, and perhaps if all is well it
> could be added to CVS and the above issues addressed in the medium term.
>
> Many thanks, and bye for now,
>

Hi,

Thank you for your submission. I am aware of the lcd4linux driver.

Anyway, I have not look at your driver yet. The font which was part of
the T6963 has been replaced nearly a year ago with one shared between
the different graphic LCD drivers. See
http://mmdolze.users.sourceforge.net/lcd_fonts.html for details.

Additionally, I strongly suggest to use the 'glcd' driver (not to be
confused with 'glcdlib' driver) available in CVS HEAD. This one takes
care of most text related parts of a LCDproc driver and support Freetype
rendering as well. Unfortunately, it is not yet optimized for use with
display that use 'paged' memory layout and requires some frame buffer
conversions in that case. The GLCD2USB device works in a similar way and
is already supported. The Freetype rendering code can unfortunately not
be used with other drivers (yet).

So if you do not want to make your device a connection type of the
'glcd' driver (which you really should give a thought), I will supply a
'paged' version of the new common 5x8 ISO 8859-1 font.

Regards,
Markus