Arduino Uno uses pins 11, 12, and 13 for SPI communication, pin 10 can be mapped elsewhere and is required to indicate we wish to speak with the VFD.

Lcd Smartie Serial Port Code Over The

Lastly the lastPress variable is setup to contain the time of the last IR code recieved, this is used to create a delay for sending the next keypress code over the serial connection.

When the first command is received the sketch clears the screen and resets the cursor position.

The flowControl variable holds the current position of the cursor, this is used to set the cursor to the 2nd line of the screen when the 21st character in an unbroken (non cursor shifted) stream.

A simple function takes this data from flash and copies it into RAM one byte at a time and displays it on the screen.

Lastly we call the vfdDisplayScreen() function to display the first screen on the VFD.

Using non-blocking functions in this loop allows us to create a sort of multi-tasking on a device that is single threaded.

Two functions are called here vfdProcess() which processes any pending commands for the screen, and remoteProcess() which processes any pending IR codes.

Other non-blocking functions can be placed here making it possible to integrate other sketches with the VFD and IR functions.

Lcd Smartie Serial Port Driver Though Care

Not every command was neccessary to make this compatible with the LCD Smartie matrix.dll driver though care is taken to properly escape the extra parameters these commands may use, otherwise this may generate junk data on the screen.

This function uses the built in Arduino function pgmreadbyte() to read one byte of flash from a particular memory address.

In this case screens is a pointer to the flash memory address containing its data.