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• My printer is too small for this enclosure

  nathan.matsuda • 08/19/2022 at 19:10 • 0 comments

  After the breadboard-level mockup of this music player was working, I wanted to see how well this would fit into the roughly half-1u form-factor I was aiming for. To do this, I needed to get the display and buttons onto some sort of chassis. I decided to try out JLCPCBs board fabrication and assembly service, which I've been meaning to do. It worked out quite well. 

  I've been using a Lulzbot Mini 2 for a couple years, which works great but is too small for a lot of my uses. I end up having to bolt parts together from smaller pieces, which I did here as well. 

  Once I've settled on the button layout and overall dimensions then I will either send this out to print in fewer pieces, or possibly try to use FrontPanelExpress to make a partially aluminum enclosure or something like that.

• Using a 640x48 graphic LCD

  nathan.matsuda • 08/19/2022 at 19:03 • 0 comments

  Back in late 2020 Twitter user @kakocom posted the first of a series of tweets outlining how to salvage an unusual 640x48 bar LCD from a kid's toy. There was a flurry of activity, with a few notable developments including @lovyan03 adding support to the LovyanGFX library, and @devemin releasing FBTFT support for the Raspberry Pi. Much of this development is logged on @pcjpnet's very helpful github repo. I heard about all of this via @bikerglen tweeting about the display stateside. 

  At the time, I was thinking about how to make a less visually obnoxious Spotify player, and was looking at a lot of bar LCDs for a rack-mount status indicator project. This little bar LCD seemed like a great way to make a half-1U standalone player. I ordered Glen's featherwing design from OSHPark and breadboarded the basic setup.

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