First completed: 2018
Introduction
I had previously developed a simple wireless temperature display system using a network of battery-powered transmitters which transmit the temperature from their current location using low-cost 433MHz AM transmitters spread around the house to a custom-made display unit. I wanted to add a second display to show the temperatures from the same transmitters in another location, and also wanted to take the opportunity to experiment with the LCD drivers that are built into selected Cypress PSoC microcontrollers.
The PSoC 4 is a microcontroller based around the ARM Cortex-M0 processor core which features a comprehensive range of built-in peripherals and a small amount of programmable logic.
The LCD
The DGL-0401YG-4EH LCD was included in the Kemo Electronic S043 "lucky bag" of surplus displays and likely originated as a heating controller display. Such a supply method would be completely inappropriate for a commercial product due to no guarantee of supply, but for a hobby project it's fine.
the LCD has 4 common pins and 12 segment pins, meaning it is designed for 1/4 duty cycle multiplexed operation. The waveforms for multiplexing an LCD are more complex than for multiplexing LED displays because intermediate voltages are required and DC bias must be eliminated to avoid long-term damage to the LCD, so they're usually generated using a dedicated driver IC or by an LCD driver peripheral built into certain microcontrollers.
The PSoC's LCD driver is capable of up to 1/8 duty or 1/16 duty depending on the part chosen, so driving this LCD is no problem. In theory, multiple 1/4 duty LCDs could be wired for 1/8 or 1/16 duty to save I/O compared to using 1/4 duty, but there's a catch! The lower the duty (higher the denominator), the smaller the viewing angle becomes, which means that the LCD only has good contrast over a smaller range of viewing positions.
Ultimately, due to the amount of I/O available on the CY8CKIT-042, 1/8 duty was chosen as a good compromise between the viewing angle and number of I/O used. Some of the heating-related symbols were unused, so not all of the segments needed to be connected either. The segment lines for the °C symbol could also be commoned to save a further I/O line as there would be no need to control these symbols individually.
The one button added to the front switches the backlight brightness between three levels.
Wireless communications
The 433MHz transmission system is a very simple system which does not define a protocol and is unidirectional, which means an unlimited amount of receivers can be added without any changes needing to be made to the firmware in the transmitters. The task of decoding and receiving the data was passed off to an NKM2401 to save time and due to reasons relating to the design of the temperature transmitters which was done previously, but it wouldn't be difficult to implement this directly in the PSoC. For debugging, the 3.5mm jack in the bottom left corner can be connected to a computer serial port with a PICAXE programming cable and serves the dual purpose of allowing the monitoring of the received packets and the generation of test packets.
The data is transmitted in 8 byte packets. The first byte represents the ID of the temperature transmitter and is unique to each transmitter; the display unit uses this ID to decide which of the four LCDs should be updated with the newly received temperature. The second byte represents the type, allowing for future expansion with types other than temperature (e.g. humidity). Bytes 3 and 4 contain the temperature, bytes 5 to 7 are unused/reserved, and byte 8 is a very simple checksum which augments the error detection already implemented in the NKM2401.
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