Interactive Arduino LCD demo
Years ago, I got myself an Arduino Uno kit - it ended up sitting on the shelf for quite a long time, and I kept wondering what would I ever do with it.One day, at an event, I saw a person wear an e-ink digital badge, and I thought: "Damn, why don't I make something like it myself?". I then quickly realized that I only had an LCD display, that couldn't do bitmaps.
Or could it?
You see, a large part of 2-line LCDs use a clone of the Hitachi HD44780 LCD controller, including the LCD display included with every Arduino (and clone) kit; and that chip allows you to define some custom characters.
Now, making a digital badge that showed my name and everything with an Arduino on a 2-line LCD was a really stupid idea; it would have been so big it would've been funny to see. So instead, I tried making something else.
While I was trying to understand how to program custom "bitmaps" (actually custom text characters), I found out that what I was trying to do had, apparently, never been done before; or if someone had done it before, I couldn't find it. So I decided to make something cooler instead; something inspired by a Tamagotchi.
(Everyone knows what that is, so I'll spare you the explanation.)
How does it work?
It doesn't actually do that much (I even ran out of custom characters!); it "boots up", blinks at you, sometimes it beeps at you, and if you don't press any buttons it closes its eyes and eventually goes to sleep.It can be woken up by pressing a button.
I plan to add stuff to it and eventually to post a demonstration video; when that last thing's done, I will update this page so you can see the thing in action. It's not very exciting, admittedly, but I find it really cool.
Here is the repository if you're interested.
