A "HELLO WORLD" PROGRAM
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Now that we have all the component subroutines written, writing the classic "Hello World" program--which displays the text "Hello World" on the LCD is a relatively trivial matter. Consider:
LCALL INIT_LCD
LCALL CLEAR_LCD
MOV A,#'H'
LCALL WRITE_TEXT
MOV A,#'E'
LCALL WRITE_TEXT
MOV A,#'L'
LCALL WRITE_TEXT
MOV A,#'L'
LCALL WRITE_TEXT
MOV A,#'O'
LCALL WRITE_TEXT
MOV A,#' '
LCALL WRITE_TEXT
MOV A,#'W'
LCALL WRITE_TEXT
MOV A,#'O'
LCALL WRITE_TEXT
MOV A,#'R'
LCALL WRITE_TEXT
MOV A,#'L'
LCALL WRITE_TEXT
MOV A,#'D'
LCALL WRITE_TEXT
The above "Hello World" program should, when executed, initialize the LCD, clear the LCD screen, and display "Hello World" in the upper left-hand corner of the display.
CURSOR POSITIONING
The above "Hello World" program is simplistic in the sense that it prints its text in the upper left-hand corner of the screen. However, what if we wanted to display the word "Hello" in the upper left-hand corner but wanted to display the word "World" on the second line at the tenth character? This sounds simple--and actually, it is simple. However, it requires a little more understanding of the design of the LCD.
The 44780 contains a certain amount of memory which is assigned to the display. All the text we write to the 44780 is stored in this memory, and the 44780 subsequently reads this memory to display the text on the LCD itself. This memory can be represented with the following "memory map":
In the above memory map, the area shaded in blue is the visible display. As you can see, it measures 16 characters per line by 2 lines. The numbers in each box is the memory address that corresponds to that screen position.
Thus, the first character in the upper left-hand corner is at address 00h. The following character position (character #2 on the first line) is address 01h, etc. This continues until we reach the 16th character of the first line which is at address 0Fh.
However, the first character of line 2, as shown in the memory map, is at address 40h. This means if we write a character to the last position of the first line and then write a second character, the second character will not appear on the second line. That is because the second character will effectively be written to address 10h--but the second line begins at address 40h.
Thus we need to send a command to the LCD that tells it to position the cursor on the second line. The "Set Cursor Position" instruction is 80h. To this we must add the address of the location where we wish to position the cursor. In our example, we said we wanted to display "World" on the second line on the tenth character position.
Referring again to the memory map, we see that the tenth character position of the second line is address 4Ah. Thus, before writing the word "World" to the LCD, we must send a "Set Cursor Position" instruction--the value of this command will be 80h (the instruction code to position the cursor) plus the address 4Ah. 80h + 4Ah = C4h. Thus sending the command C4h to the LCD will position the cursor on the second line at the tenth character position:
SETB EN
CLR RS
MOV DATA,#0C4h
CLR EN
LCALL WAIT_LCD
The above code will position the cursor on line 2, character 10. To display "Hello" in the upper left-hand corner with the word "World" on the second line at character position 10 just requires us to insert the above code into our existing "Hello World" program. This results in the following:
LCALL INIT_LCD
LCALL CLEAR_LCD
MOV A,#'H'
LCALL WRITE_TEXT
MOV A,#'E'
LCALL WRITE_TEXT
MOV A,#'L'
LCALL WRITE_TEXT
MOV A,#'L'
LCALL WRITE_TEXT
MOV A,#'O'
LCALL WRITE_TEXT
SETB EN
CLR RS
MOV DATA,#0C4h
CLR EN
LCALL WAIT_LCD
MOV A,#'W'
LCALL WRITE_TEXT
MOV A,#'O'
LCALL WRITE_TEXT
MOV A,#'R'
LCALL WRITE_TEXT
MOV A,#'L'
LCALL WRITE_TEXT
MOV A,#'D'
LCALL WRITE_TEXT
