Summer's End is Nearing

My favorite summer yet is reaching its end. With about a month and a half before I begin dental school, I pause to reflect on what I’ve done, and what I still plan to do. Unlike previous summers where my time was devoted to academic requirements, this summer involved a 9-5 job with time to do whatever I wanted after. I made great progress in the realm of microcontroller programming, and am nearing the completion of my prime number calculator. I’m very happy with its progress.

Most of the LEDs are working but I’m still missing a few shift registers. It’s not that they’re missing, so much as I broke them. (D’oh!) I have to wait for a dozen more to come in the mail so I can continue this project. Shift registers are also responsible for powering the binary-to-7-segment chips on the upper left, whose sockets are currently empty.

Since this project is on pause, I began work hacking a VFD I heard about at Skycraft. It’s a 20x2 character display (forgot to photograph the front) and if I can make it light up, it will be gorgeous.

Here’s a high resolution photo of the back panel of the VFD. I believe it used to belong to an old cash register, and it has some digital interfacing circuitry between the driver chips (the big OKI ones) and the 9-pin input connector. I think my best bet for being able to control this guy as much as I want is to attack those driver chips, with help from the Oki C1162A datasheet. It looks fairly straightforward. As long as I don’t screw up my surface-mount soldering, and assuming that I come up with 65 volts to power the thing (!) I think it’s a doable project.