Tech Reaction

Last year I began working on a project with a couple of friends that was based on a 4” LCD Display powered by a SLCD6 controller.

After seeing these units at Reachtech.com who manufactures these units in all different sizes and specifications I thought to myself that one of these units would be a great MOD to show computer data on the front of my TJ07 that I had just built. With the help from my friend Jeff I managed to get a unit from Steve over at Reachtech, both of whom are great guys and friends that I have known for some time.

The 4” LCD Display has a fully programmable SLCD6 controller with touch screen and the ability to upload programs and graphics, and talk to the computer through a USB port.

This is the unit I started out with to give you an idea of what these look like.

Starting with this I began to mock up what I thought the screens should look like. As I was extremely busy at that time I happened to come across a really good graphic artist Ross Fairbanks of GUIMagic who has done a large amount of work with Windowblinds. We exchanged ideas and came up with the very first set of screens that would show CPU usage, CPU temps, Fan Speeds and a Clock. These were the basic building blocks of the project and later changed to better fit programing problems and new ideas.

The project was begging to take shape now, this is the first screen.

Uploading this image to the LCD to seeing what this would actually look like. It looked very, very good so we dove into this and began to add more features.

Mocking this up in a bezzel and fitting it to the front of the TJ07

everything is great so far and looking good. Jeff ran into a programer by the name of  Craig Williamson who worked his magic and helpped get this unit up and running so it would animate the images and talk to a computer through a USB port and get all the vital data needed to display on the LCD.

As a test I installed the unit on my benching setup and it worked great.

Now with a working unit we began to look at cases or bezzels to mount the LCD into. Jeff managed to pick up a Garman GPS unit and we took out the display from that and installed ours into it. This looked really good and was just what we had been looking for. However having a injection mold setup made so we could make our own cases was rather costly and way out of our price range for this project.

Later Jeff had a simple plastic stand made up that worked well and easy for us to have made.

We still have lots of  loose endso complete this project but it stands right now it is  fully functional unit that can display CPU Usage, CPU Temps, Fan Speeds, RS Feeds and a Clock. Some of the data that is used to display on this comes from Everest and we can configure our own app to show a few different things like GPU temps or a mix of GPU and CPU temps and different fan speeds from what ever is installed in the computer. Different screens can be shown by pressing the buttons at the bottom of the screen to show what ever you want to display.

Around this time ZombieTek was born.

This unit works really well and would be great for a modding project, custom built computer case or other projects. Some features that we still need to work on is displaying more than 4 CPU cores and the number of Cores has grown a great deal from when we started this project. Other features that we had in mind were to include a skinnable graphics library so a user could upload different back grounds. Much of this would take a fair amount of time to do so that has been pretty much put on hold for now.

Here is a few examples of splash screens that could be used, really what ever you wish could be uploaded here. These are a few branded screens.