Matrix Orbital Corp

Having some major problems trying to get communication between the 2 - if anyone has any advice I would sure appreciate it.

It does not appear that any communication is going across... I am using the Wire.h library for I2C.

The LCD works... because before attempting to hook it to the atmega168, I attached it to a pc via RS-232....

Then I drove myself nuts trying to unsolder and solder the MINUTE SMT jumpers to put it in I2C mode.....

The LCD still powers up, but no communication....

BTW.... MATRIX..... WHY IN THE WORLD would you use such a small SMT resistor as a jumper that needs to possibly be moved by the end user.....

Hello tj4shee,

Thanks for your post.

I am sorry but I am not familiar with the Arduino board. I suggest that you follow any suggestions that they have.

Here are some reminders on your I2C implementation:
- please put the LK162-12 in I2C mode (and yes, I am sorry for the inconvenience, but for reasons of real state on the board, we have limited the connections to small jumpers - you do not need to reconnect the 0 Ohm jump, but just make solder blobs on the jump pads - you will find that this does not take so much effort)
- remember to put pull up resistors on the SCL and SDA lines
- make sure that you address the slave with $50 and not $28 which is the Philip's 7-bit address for $50

Also, feel free to look around here on the forums, there are quite a few I2C posts that hopefully some will help you out.

Please let me know if this helps.

Best Regards,

Hi Raquel,

Thanks for answering.... I finally gave up yesterday afternoon and switched to TTL serial... got it working quicker than the time it took to solder....

re: soldering... Yes, that was pretty stupid of me... I knew they were 0's... yet it did not hit me until I had to change over to TTL - MUCH easier...

re: the Arduino board... it is simply a pre-made development board - with an atmega168 MCU. The board breaks out the pins to headers and has usb<->rs232 as well as a pre-populated bootloader... so you can start programming as soon as you get it.... it has a good amount of open source support also....

check out http://www.arduino.cc if you are interested.

Hello tj4shee,

Glad to hear that things are working out.

The Arduino boards looks like a good development tool. I am sure someone out there will be glad to hear about it; thanks for the link.

If you have any more concerns, please let me know.