Thursday, March 24, 2011

I2C LCD performance

I am a bit disappointed in the performance of the Arduino LCD driver, especially with the I2C interface enabled.  I am not sure how much time I want to spend optimizing the standard Arduino libraries, especially since a beacon in operation really doesn't need a display.  Realistically, it is just convenient for me while developing this project.  I think what I will do is just optimize the display usage to only update what actually changes rather than repainting everything whenever anything changes.  If that is insufficient, I will turn off the frequently updated portions of the LCD when doing time critical operations such as when transmitting signals with critical timing criteria such as WSPR.

2 comments:

  1. Which lib are you using? I have a New Haven LCD and was using the LCDi2cNHD library and it was very slow until I tweaked the g_cmdDelay variable in the *.cpp file.

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  2. The performance of the i2c driver on the AdaFruit site is poor. However, there is one that is much improved. Check out the work by falconfour on this link:

    http://forums.adafruit.com/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=21586&p=113177

    falconfour's code has a bug on reset, but there is code in the thread to fix it. Performance is so good you can do animations using this driver.

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