FreeBSD
The patch attached to PR
usb/128803 is needed to get the PicoLCD
4X20 working on FreeBSD version prior to 8-CURRENT (As noted in the PR, 8-CURRENT has the patch merged into newusb).
Unless you load your USB stack as a kld, you will need to rebuild your entire kernel. Details on how to achieve this
can be found in the FreeBSD handbook in
this chapter.
Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard"
Under OS X, the PicoLCD 4X20 device gets attached to by the USB HID driver. To prevent this from happening, a kext must
be loaded at boot time for the device. The kext in question is available here.
At this point in time, you must manually install the kext using Terminal.app. This is done by using the following
commands:
tar zxvf USBLCD4x20.kext.10_5.tar.gz
sudo mv USBLCD4x20.kext /System/Library/Extensions
sudo touch /System/Library/Extensions
To complete the process, you will need to reboot your system. Upon reboot, libusb or any other USB-aware library or
program can claim the needed interfaces to talk to the device. If you are not sure which libusb-based program to use at
this point, I recommend using LCDproc. At the time of this writing, you will need
to get the latest version from the CVS repository, as the PicoLCD 4x20 support doesn't feature in any release. This
process involves building the LCDproc suite. For those not inclined to do so, I have pre-built binaries available for
download here. These can be installed by saving the picolcd.cvs.macosx.tar.gz
archive in your home directory and running the following command:
tar zxvf picolcd.cvs.macosx.tar.gz
I have both a sample LCDd.conf and a sample lcdproc.conf available
for download. By default, the LCDproc suite will look for these files in /usr/local/etc/. You can place these files in
this directory by running the following commands from the terminal:
sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/etc/
sudo mv lcdproc.conf LCDd.conf /usr/local/etc/
At this point, provided you have libusb installed from Fink or MacPorts, you are ready to connect up the device and run
LCDproc:
~/bin/LCDd
~/bin/lcdproc
Voila! LCDproc has a ton of configurable options, most of which I have disabled in the configuration files above. You
probably want to play with the settings in the lcdproc.conf file until you get it doing the tricks that you want...
Mac OS X 10.6 "Snow Leopard" (Updated)
The instructions for getting the PicoLCD 4x20 working on Snow Leopard are almost exactly the same as Leopard excepted
for the use of a different kext package for 10.6 and the need to ensure that
the extension is installed with user "root" as owner and "wheel" as the group. This step needs to be performed after all
of the ones outlined for Leopard:
sudo chown -R root:wheel /System/Library/Extensions/USBLCD4x20.kext
Alternatively, you can run "Repair Disk Permissions" from the "Disk Utility" application that ships with Mac OS X to get
the ownership of these files straightened out. Do note that the Snow Leopard package has a different name than the
Leopard one and you will need to substitute "10.6" for "10.5" when running the tar command listed in the previous set of
instructions. If you encounter a message claiming that the extension is not installed properly, make sure that you have
set the kext ownership properly!
Feedback
Let me know how things work out for you (And if I can improve the information provided herein)! If you like what you see
here, please refer the site to a fellow user in need.