AIDA64 data out to 4D Systems TFT LCD

[WanaGo]

Hello,

I hope this hasn't already been covered, not found this exact question though already asked.

4D Systems makes a bunch of LCD products which mainly have UART interfaces. They are not primary display interfaces, so don't take an HDMI input etc from your PC, they can be programmed to handle serial data and display it in various ways. You design the GUI yourself in their IDE and then you feed it the data you want in the known format, and make it do what you like with that data.

What I am trying to find out is if there is a way to use AIDA64 to collect the data from the PC, such as CPU temperature etc, and send the data out the UART to the display. I don't want all the graphics from AIDA64, all I want is the data for the sensors.

I have used AIDA64 for a while, going to a external HDMI monitor and displaying data on that, and it works, but now and then I get issues where windows decides the little monitor is the primary, or the mouse goes in there and gets stuck, and all sorts of other weird things. I also dont want it loading my GPU at all, I just want it off that whole system entirely.

Is there a way to have AIDA64 export in a stream the selected Sensor data, to the serial UART? These 4D displays can handle BAUD's into the MBaud rates, so not 9600 or 115200 type levels.

If there is, can you please point me in the right direction.

If there is a way to get this data, I can create a demo project use a 4D Systems display, and post that up here for other people to use as a base. I have used 4D displays for years in various applications at work and around the house, we build full systems at work using their products, and it just seems the perfect application for PC Chassis builds, rather than using HDMI type solutions off the GPU. Let the display do the GUI 'heavy lifting' itself with its GPU and just feed it the data it is looking for from AIDA64.

Any tips would be appreciated

Regards

W

[WanaGo]

Better than a string output would actually be raw bytes. I noticed on the LCD menu, I select POS for example and used the Epson ESC/POS option and set it to a COM port (USB to Serial device I have connect), and then put in 2 sensors into the LCD Items, removing the Label, and making the units a comma (,) and then sniffed the serial port with another USB to Serial device, and I was getting 53,45, as an example of 2 sensor temperatures. It was however padded by lots of spaces, which I guess I could work with, but is there a nicer solution to this?

I will start with this and try and build up a bunch of sensors into this sort of string, and then read in the values on the display, remove the spaces and the commas and put each sensor into variables and have them displays on a GUI.

Just wondering if there is a nicer way other than this POS method with strings and space padding etc.

[WanaGo]

Bit of playing around and got something working. Far from complete, but thought I would put some values on the screen and plot one of them in a Scope.

Still using the POS option out of a serial port, and using 3 sensors at the moment. So of the 40 bytes that come out of the stream, for the 2 rows of 20 characters, I am using 6 of them. I am still delimiting each one with a comma using the 'unit' field for that. Seems to be working but would be nice to refine this a little more.

Would be really nice to have a custom LCD option, where you can select a Qualifier character, such as <STX> or similar so you can get the Serial code to lock on to the start of the package. Then put each of the sensors you want, like you do for the POS, but be able to select a delimiter between sensor values. Also if it could output RAW values, not characters, that would be even better. Would be great so it didn't send the padded 'space' characters (Hex 0x20) for each unused character, but I guess it needs to for this particular POS system.

But for now, at least I have it working so far.

Excuse the fuzz from my camera.

[WanaGo]

Question though, how do you change the Baud rate? It appears to be on 9600 which is really slow, would be nice to bump it up quite a bit.

[WanaGo]

11 hours ago, WanaGo said:

Question though, how do you change the Baud rate? It appears to be on 9600 which is really slow, would be nice to bump it up quite a bit.

Nevermind, found out its done in Device Manager. 

[Fiery]

I think your best bet for such a custom solution would be to develop a Windows application that polls either the shared memory, Registry or WMI interfaces that AIDA64 exposes (see: AIDA64 / main menu / File / Preferences / Hardware Monitoring / External Applications) and send the values in a format you find best to the serial port of your choice.