Serial VFD character displays are awesome

I finally spent a few minutes powering up the serial VFDs I bought a month or so ago, they are all working. :)




And it's bright! :D Placing a filter over the front will increase contrast and make it much easier to read in bright conditions.

I will say that these are by far the easiest displays I have ever worked with. Powered it up with 5V, wired it through a max232 to my machine, 19200, 8,1,1 was its default serial config and it was running. Any text to the terminal showed up on the display. Special codes can place cursor and clear the display. With a little extra work you can write custom characters to the displays memory. Interfacing these with any microcontroller will be so easy and will save a bunch of io pins and code space not having to interface HD44780 compatible displays via a parallel interface.

Updates and new serial VFD modules

I'm finally moved in the new place, unfortunately there has been a lot of 'home things' that needed attention that have pushed back my electronic and software projects. I have been setting up my benches and unpacking my equipment this week in the new basement work area which I am very excited about. I should actually be able to start getting back into things this coming week.

Today my new serial VFDs showed up which has me pretty excited:

They are two line by 20 character display with both an 8 bit 5v parallel and up to 19200bps serial interface. Vacuum fluorescent displays just have a nice glow to them that contrasts the typical look of an LCD display you see today. I plan on using one as a primary display interface for my CPU project among other things.