| Linux Kernel & Device Driver Programming |
| Summer 2008 |
This is a very simple device, which Dr. Kumar would like to be able to mount on the wall by his office door for posting notes to people who might come by to see him while he is out. The idea is that he could connec this to his workstation, and write to it remotely from wherever he is, telling where he is, when he expects to be back, etc.
The task would involve a little bit of physical work to hook up the device to a power supply and data cable, and then some programming to create a device driver for it. There is a good chance that the driver could be written at the user level, using the existing generic serial or parallel device driver. However, to make it interesting for this course you would do it at the kernel level. Features you could provide include not only the ability to read and write the text to be displayed, but a scrolling sign feature for messages that are too large to entirely fit on the screen, and control over the rate at which the sign scrolls.
Warnings:
This may turn out to be a too-simple task to fully meet the educational objectives for this project. In particular, it appears that this device can be used with the standard Windows parallel driver, and so is likely to also work with the standard Linux parallel driver or with simple modifications to the "short.c" example driver. Assuming that is true, you would have nothing to do in the kernel, and would then need to be creative about finding ways to practice kernel programming techniques.
Some do-it-yourself hardware assembly may be required, depending on how much time I can spend on doing the hardware setup for you. I have to modules, and have started on mounting them and wiring them up to a standard parallel port connector. However, I have not made much progress. If I cannot complete this for you in time, you may need to take over responsibility for assembly.
The following is the vendor's description of the LCD display module:
More details are in this directory.
| ($Id$) |