Epson E0855-2 LCD display (with adapter kit, both from Pollin) under linux

As of version 1.97.5 the EPSON E0885-2 lcd display is part of serdisplib and officially supported. Thanks Wolfgang!

Tobias Stoeber -- 2006/04/05

This page is about using the Epson E0855-2 LCD display (distributed by Pollin Electronic) under linux.
Pollin sells this display and the adapter kit for the parallel port at 2,95 € each (which is very cost-effective). The total cost is 5,90 € (September 2006).

One only needs the usual skills with the soldering iron, only when attaching the display to adapter's PCB you have to be careful (lead-wire spacing 0.8 mm! - as seen in the pictures below).

With only 96 x 32 px resolution the display will maybe not be very useful with VDR or GraphLCD. It works quite well with lcd4linux, so it fits my purposes. I would like to use it as "main display" for a little router based on an old PC/104 board, which will have no VGA display.

Specs

resolution	96 x 32 px, additional symbols + 7 seg. display
colours	monochrome
backlight	yes, built-in (LED, green)
contrast	adjustable, programmable (1 - 10)
controller	SED 1530
name in modified serdisplib	E08552
comment	adapter kit using 8bit data bus, backlight works additional symbols + 7 seg. display not supported yet

Ordering info

The link to Pollin is http://www.pollin.de (German).

LCD display Epson E0855-2: Ord. no. / Best.Nr. 120 329
Adapter kit (Anschlussplatine): Ord. no. / Best.Nr. 120 384

E0855-2 Linux Support

The lcd display is driven by serdisplib's SED153x driver, which can be found at http://serdisplib.sourceforge.net/.
Many thanks to Wolfgang Astleitner for this great lib!

Officical support for the E0855-2 display will be (presumably) included in serdisplib-1.98. Meanwhile you can try your luck with my changed source files. I've used serdisplib-1.97.2 as the basis and I've changed the following files a little bit:

Changed files

Remarks on using `/dev/parport0`

To use the display as non-root user via /dev/parport0 you have to have the ppdev module loaded. Just issue a modprobe ppdev and check the permissions + user/group for the device file.