A few years ago people had beige, purely functional computers... hidden under desks, stained with the office smoker's exhalation. Then some strange individuals decided to "pimp up" their computers in the vain of car modding enthusiasts and suddenly case modding was born. We had neon lights, LEDs (usually "bl00") and stealthed CD drives... aluminium cases, cathodes and rainbow fans... and of course, a favourite of the early days, LCD display panels.

As with everything, the addition of LCD displays started with electronics whizz-kids - wiring controllers to their parallel ports. It has now grown to companies offering production line USB character display and graphical models. But even for all the expansion in this (rather niche) market, the prices remain fairly high for the mainstream products - Maxtrix Orbital and CrystalFontz offer some excellent products but neither can provide a price the less enthusiastic modder wants to pay. Take a step backwards, in terms of technology, to the parallel port LCD screen and you can have show-off stats scrolling accross your case front for a bargain price. In this case, just shy of £20.

The very non-descript box

The more interesting contents of said box

The LCD I'm looking at is a 20x4 character model from watercoolingshop.com. It's a parallel port model, using the common HD44780 controller, pre-wired for easy "installation". The display is sold in a plain box, with a cable... no fancy extras, no software, no attractive drive-bay surround and no manual... but it's so easy to find some free display software with instructions, and with only one cable to connect installation couldn't be a lot simpler. The lack of a drive-bay insert may trouble some people - you might need to do some DIY to install the unit cleanly into a case, or construct an external support.

So we've established what comes in the box - an LCD and a cable. This one cable integrates the power and data supplies for the screen, keeping everything neat and simple. A standard molex plug provides power and this is fed back through the housing of the parallel port and up a common lead to the screen itself. This means for internal mounting you will need to loop the power out of the case to the parallel connector, then loop the cable for the screen back into the case again. For external mounting you just need to feed the power lead into the case. The easiest method is to remove an expansion slot cover and use the resulting hole... perfectionists might like to cut a slit for the leads into the cover and slide it back into place. I'll leave that part up to you.

The combined data/power cable

Once the power and parallel leads are connected everything else is software configuration. After installing port95nt [alt], lcd driving software will be able to communicate with the display through your parallel port. What exactly is displayed will depend on your choice of software - I use a winamp plugin to display music information and a visualisation on my screen, but many software titles and plugins are available to show such information as system temperatures, cpu load, memory usage and so on.

I gave LCDSmartie and LCDPlugin a try:

LCDSmartie

LCDSmartie is an open-source program offering all the functions of commercial products like LCDC but without any [compulsory] purchase price. Straight after installing, the program will cycle a number of preset screens. You can then customise these and create your own set of screens using the at first daunting but in fact very easy screens setup controls.

Looks complicated? It's really not once you get the hang of it!

In fact the default screens are fairly likely to be the kind of information you'll want to display. In the true spirit of modding, though, it'd be rude not to do some personalisation. Some screens also seem to be setup to use larger screens better so a bit of trimming down can make these screens look much nicer on a 4x20 screen. Here's some photo's of some of the screens:

Example screens, including the (optional) introduction "splash" screen

An example of trimming a screen down for the 4x20 display. The top line scrolls.

And to show that making a custom screen is easy, even I managed it:

Computer name / Time / Date / Uptime - all added from LCDSmarties list of preset options.

I won't go through all the options... suffice to say there are plenty. You can install and run LCDSmartie without a display installed as it has a preview window on the desktop which emulates the output of an LCD panel. So, if you're not sure if the output suits your needs, give it a try.

Desktop LCD "emulation"

LCDPlugin

The first setup screen for LCDPlugin

LCDPlugin is a plugin which outputs winamp information only, no other stuff like system stats. It's a lovely plugin but since Smartie is able to do most if not all of the winamp related tasks it seems a bit redundant. However bundled with it is a visualisation plugin with outputs the winamp equaliser to the LCD display. It's a bit buggy (it needs to start with Winamp and if stop the output once you cannot turn it back on it without restarting Winamp) but it looks excellent, especially with the drop-off effect enabled. Here's a short animated GIF taken from a video recorded on my digital camera:

*daannnce.. to the muusiccc*

This is the best function of LCDPlugin... for displaying winamp info I actually feel LCDSmartie does a better job, but it doesn't have the funky graphic output!

Setting up is a little more complex than in LCDSmartie, with no clever menu to pick and choose functions from. It's hardly difficult though, as a help box-out gives you the codes required to display the certain bits of information.

Only one screen with LCDPlugin, though plenty of Winamp info to choose from

To be honest LCDPlugin is only really useful for the graphical output... for Winamp data and other info LCDSmartie is the business. There are other packages out there but for the purposes of this review LCDSmartie shows off what the display can do. I'm happy with this hardware and software combination - it would be a nice idea to ship out LCDSmartie on a CD with the display but I guess this would add to costs and I'm not totally sure about the legality of distributing open source on disk/CD.

The WCS display has proved very easy to get running and is a nice, and dare I say it almost useful, addition to the front of my case. For case modders without a display it offers amazing value when compared to it's peers in the marketplace... the parallel interface may scare some people off but it really needn't. The software scene is more commercially driven for serial and USB units, but community development has kept the parallel display alive and kicking - the open-source LCDSmartie is an excellent program and continues to evolve.

The panel is covered with protective plastic to keep it pristine during transit

The price of this unit had me worried initially but playing with it for a while has shown me it's as good as any other HD44780 unit... really, how could it not have been? If you've wanted an LCD display for your computer but have been disuaded by the extortionate prices of the serial and USB units, and you have a spare parallel port (printers tend to use USB these days so the parallel port is generally free), one of these units could be perfect for you.

Cheap
Does the job
Looks great
Very easy to set up
Uses parallel port
..(if your printer uses it you're out of luck)
Requires wires looped in through the back
..(usb lcds can be connected to the motherboard)

Related:
Watercoolingshop.com - online store.
LCDSmartie @ Sourceforge.
LCDPlugin @ Sourceforge.

CrystalFontz
Matrix Orbital