Last year I upgraded from a Futaba VFD with built-in USB to a Noritake VFD with only Serial and Parallel interfaces.
After taking a long time to realize I would not be able to drive that display using a PC Parallel Port I got into Micro-controllers.
I had a first go with Arduino Micro which worked nicely enough if not for some pixel noise I could not get rid of.
Since I could not tolerate that mess I decided to port my solution to Teensy 3.2. Sure enough that pixel noise problem was never an issue on Teensy 3.2 where I could bend those pins to my will. It has now been running in a production environment 24/7 without a single failure for over 6 months.
One thing though, I'm pretty sure I should be able to improve the frame rate. It could be a while until I find enough time to work on performance optimization but if you guys have tips I'll take them. Is there really no way to send data chunks larger than 64 bytes over USB?
After taking a long time to realize I would not be able to drive that display using a PC Parallel Port I got into Micro-controllers.
I had a first go with Arduino Micro which worked nicely enough if not for some pixel noise I could not get rid of.
Since I could not tolerate that mess I decided to port my solution to Teensy 3.2. Sure enough that pixel noise problem was never an issue on Teensy 3.2 where I could bend those pins to my will. It has now been running in a production environment 24/7 without a single failure for over 6 months.
One thing though, I'm pretty sure I should be able to improve the frame rate. It could be a while until I find enough time to work on performance optimization but if you guys have tips I'll take them. Is there really no way to send data chunks larger than 64 bytes over USB?