Arduino with ILM-216L

Helped a customer interface an ILM-216L to an Arduino--all it required was a tweak to the previous Hello World example for the BPI-216.

Both of these older displays expect inverted serial input, the logic-level equivalent of old-school RS-232. The Arduino's UART, the logical place to connect a serial device, outputs non-inverted serial, so the initial hookup produced gibberish.

The answer is simple: Use the SoftwareSerial library to drive the display via a general-purpose I/O pin, and set the instruction for inverted output via an optional parameter. It's all demonstrated in the previous app note here.

I suggested a change to the clearScreen constant in the example code to match the ILM's instruction set:

const char clearScreen[ ] = {12,0};

It apparently did the trick, because a few minutes this pic arrived by email:

Happy to help!