hi i was wondering if there was another way to plug the lcd into the cortex without the serial y cable
There’s not. The LCD was designed with using two 3-wire extension cables to plug into a microcontroller, but the Cortex uses UART ports for the LCD.
I’m sure you could hack together a custom-made serial Y-cable using one of the I2C cables with a pair of 3-wire connectors (with some careful soldering), but it would definitely not be legal for the VEX Robotics Competition.
Thanks for the information
Do you not have the Cables, or were you trying to do something else?
The Vex LCD is basically a Serial Terminal… If it is Not Connected to a Serial Port, there is no way to Display Information or Read the Button Presses…
ive never used an lcd before so i bought it but not the cable anyways thanks for the replys
The PIC Controller has Three Wire Serial Ports and can be connected with the 3-Wire Extension Cables (7 options).
On the Cortex Controller, you could use the 3-Wire Extension Cables to connect the LCD to one of the Analog or Digital Ports, providing Power and Ground to the Display, but because there are Data Lines, no Information can be exchanged with it…
I would recommend getting those cables…
if you have the tools you can easily make a cable yourself. ive done it a few times
This is true. However, just for clarification, it is not competition legal to do so, unless your cable is *identical *to VEX’s.
I believe as long as it is a “Y” cable with tx, rx, +, - going to a 4 pin connector. i believe it would be competition legal. please correct me if im wrong.
Sorry–I’ve been away from this forum for a while. The rules require to be exactly identical (which means in length of wires, size of connectors, gauge of wires, etc.).