Speedo

I recently (in 2008) completed a cycling expedition in Leh-Ladhak through the YHAI camp. But wait, this post is not about the expedition. You can find the Flickr set here.

I hadn’t cycled for years and wanted to cycle again. But suddenly heading for a high altitude (11500 feet) 240Km+ adventure could have proved disastrous. The expedition was a perfect opportunity to invest in a new cycle and reignite the lost passion. So a month prior to the trip, I bought myself a Suncross mountain bike and began practicing. It soon occurred to me that a speedo/odometer could prove very handy. I simply couldn’t resist the temptation of building one myself than to invest in an off-the-shelf solution. But the month kept me busy in other things and the speedo project could never see the light of day.

So on my return, I took up the project and managed to make some significant headway. The plan is to use a magnet-reed switch pair to detect wheel revolutions, graphics LCD for displaying the information and a PIC uC to do all the processing. I narrowed down on the Nokia 3310 LCD (it’s easy to find/use, light weight, cheap and there’s plenty on info available on the web). For the uC, I chose the PIC18F452, 28pin microcontroller (I had sampled many of them a while ago and were laying unused). Although, economically, I think Atmega8 is a better option here.

Here is the setup I plan to use in the final design:

 

Note that the LCD can only be powered by voltages from 2V to 3.3V. Since the PIC can easily work from a 3V source, I plan to use 2xAAA cells. There is no inbuilt backlight on the Nokia LCD, hence LED1 –LED4 are used for backlight and would also serve well during debugging.

The Nokia LCD is controlled via the SPI port. Till now I have managed to build a decent library for it which can display characters in normal/big fonts, display images and do the usual routines like clearing, inverting, etc. I wanted to try out this LCD for a long time and initially thought it might be difficult to hack. But that’s certainly not the case. The control is pretty straight forward once you have the SPI setup correctly. I’ll write about the interface in-depth some time soon.

Here is a schematic of the basic setup currently in place:

I wrote a small script in Python that converts the bitmap (.bmp) images into nicely laid out HEX numbers. I later simply copy-paste it into an array and I’m good to go! The script makes use of the Python Imaging Library (PIL) for reading the images.
The images can be designed in any photopaint application. They have to be 1-bit black/white with a size of 84×48 pixels.

[cc lang=”python” tab_size=”4″]
import Image
im = Image.open(“sample.bmp”)
x = 0
y = 0
z = 0
numL = 0
numH = 0
conv = [1,2,4,8]
while z<=5: x = 0 while x<=83:         y = 0 while y<=3:         value = im.getpixel((x,y+(z*8)))           if value==0: numL = (numL | conv[y])      y += 1 while y<=7:       value = im.getpixel((x,y+(z*8)))       if value==0: numH = (numH | conv[y-4])         y += 1 print "0x"+('%x' %numH) + ('%x' %numL)+",", numL = 0 numH = 0 x += 1 z += 1 z += 1 [/cc] Some sample LCD screenshots:


Update :

I got the PCB fabricated and assembled but haven’t gotten around to complete it since I moved to the US.

 

References:
1. Sylvain Bissonnette’s Website : He has written the nokiaLCD driver for AVR microcontrollers.
2. Pete Harrison: Pete uses a similar Nokia 3410 LCD (96×64 pixels) for his micromouse. He has used a dsPIC microcontroller and has published a library for the same.

 

Last updated on: 20 Nov 2008