Having trouble passing commands to Posiflex VFD

[Blaze89]

Managed to find a cheap customer display on ebay in poor but working condition. It had been stored in a bin bag in a box outside for months and posted in said box minus the spiders and bugs. It was filthy and slightly rusty but seems to work OK.

It is a Posiflex PD-2200, it has Futaba, Noritake, Aedex, ADM and Epson emulation modes. It came with a terminator that goes on the pass-through port but it makes no difference. I can't seem to send any commands to the display and it's set to scroll the bottom line to the top so it won't update properly with Smartie.

Has anyone had any experience with similar displays? I've tried command line, a serial byte sender and Smartie, but nothing seems to work.

[hydrolisk1792]

Hello mate I'm not sure if you figured out the problem yet but I'll try to help. Have you search to google for a data sheet yet on that for futaba display board. There are usually hex decimal commands to wake up the display and get it out of sleep mode. Something like 05 06 ext. This may seem a bit confusing if you don't know what you're doing. After which you wake up the display then you can send ASCII characters directly to the display Via a terminal emulator program on your windows PC. This program will access your serial port directly. If you do not have a serial port on your windows PC you can get a USB to serial port converter. They are fairly cheap on eBay And generally plug-and-play. Let me know if you need any further instructions in this matter.

[Blaze89]

Nah, I still haven't figured it out yet. I have the command sheets and manuals and I can send text to the screen, but when trying to send the commands to configure the various options the display just ignores them.

I am connecting the screen with only the serial TX wire, maybe that is an issue. I have tried connecting DSR/DTR and a few other wires but I am unsure if they connected properly. I haven't managed to send text at all with Futaba emulation, only Noritake.

Here is the Posiflex commands manual:
http://www.posiflexusa.com/docs/UMPD2X00CE.pdf

[hydrolisk1792]

Okay from what I can see from the data sheet you have provided, Smartie will not be able to run this display without a custom driver. I know someone here on the forums that is capable of writing yoyu a custom driver for this display. You will have to provide him with the data sheet as well. You will probably want to use either the epson or futuba modes for anything to work at all. As a disclaimer, I do not own the hardware, so I can't be completely sure of anything, however I can try and guide you in the proper direction to get your unit working properly. Just having the TX hooked up shoud do fine, however try and also hook up the RX as well just to be sure. Ill get you the name of the person here that can write you a custom driver for your display. His forum name is dperrow, contact him via PM and talk with him about your display and also provide him with the datasheet. He is really good at writing drivers for these types of displays. He wrote me two custom drivers for the VFDs customer type displays I use around my shop let me know how it goes.

[dperrow]

Hi guys, haven't been on the forum for a while since my employer blocked access for some unknown reason. I'll have a look at the document over the weekend and see what can be done.

[Guest]

sent via private message as I can't upload to this forum. Please let me know that you got it as it's sitting in my outbox rather than sent items and I've no idea why.

[hydrolisk1792]

dperrow,

Thank you for helping out this person with his customer display problem. I hope that it was okay that I refereed him to you for this problem. Cheers.

[dperrow]

Glad to help, sent him a driver to try but he hasn't responded yet.

[hydrolisk1792]

Glad to help, sent him a driver to try but he hasn't responded yet.

I know this is a bit off topic, but, it seems like we are the only ones on here all the time lol. I'm sure that he will get back with you as soon as he logs back in or thinks about that screen sitting there doing nothing lol. Oh and (we can move this to a new topic if needed) have you ever played around with an IBM 4683 POS keyboard? It has 50 keys and an LCD display onboard. There is also a slot for a card reader module. I have looked high and low and so far all I have figured out is that it uses a RS485 interface.

[Blaze89]

I'm sorry for the lack of replies between then and now. I did get the driver but I could never really confirm if it worked or not, but many thanks anyway.

After spending literally days on it I have only worked out recently that maybe it had issues. The chips in it are from 99 and I suspect the ROM in it has now passed on. It was only displaying garbage last night, now its completely dead aside from the firmware version.

It's a shame because it's a nice oversize custom screen, it will blind you on full brightness. Maybe I will take a pic of the back to see if anyone can help patch the dead chip out

Thanks for the help all.

[hydrolisk1792]

I'm sorry for the lack of replies between then and now. I did get the driver but I could never really confirm if it worked or not, but many thanks anyway.

After spending literally days on it I have only worked out recently that maybe it had issues. The chips in it are from 99 and I suspect the ROM in it has now passed on. It was only displaying garbage last night, now its completely dead aside from the firmware version.

It's a shame because it's a nice oversize custom screen, it will blind you on full brightness. Maybe I will take a pic of the back to see if anyone can help patch the dead chip out

Thanks for the help all.

Oh no worries mate. Um, yeah come on here and post a pic of it, maybe I can dig something out of my parts bins and see if I could help you get this up and running again