Nothing like reviving an old thread
Well, what can I say, this LCD thing in Kodi has been a real ball ache for me
I have an old Antec Fusion desktop media centre case with a Soundgraph vfd, the one that connects via usb and is powered by a floppy connector. There is no ir, but it does have a volume knob (which doesn't work). I bought this case when Windows XP MCE edition was released, so that'll give you some idea of how old it is!
I don't see the point in upgrading it as it's been faultless and is a nice looking case too.
I had been using XP MCE and then upgraded to Windows 7 64bit a number of years ago and used the windows MCE without issue, the lcd screen worked a treat with the old vfd drivers I found in google somewhere.
Recently, I disabled MCE and installed Mediaportal and along with the mini-display driver was able to use the vfd without missing a beat, and stream live tv all over the house etc, it was great.
I'm in love with Kodi now though, the amount of stuff available for kids is incredible, and has made me somewhat of a hero at home
I'm completely lost with the VFD though, and I think I've tried everything without success.
There is an LCD plugin on the Kodi repositries, XBMCDLCDProc or something, but that did nothing at all, and having tried google searches here there and everywhere, I came across a few people saying that LCDSmartie is the way to go... So here I am
I have installed LCDSmartie and have the display working fine using it's own imond.dll driver, I did have a few problems loading the XBMC4LCDSmartie.dll exception errors but sorted that by copying the LCDSmartie.exe.config file into the main LCDSmartie folder and adding a few lines to force the windows 7 64bit dll runtime policy;
This is the contents of that config file...
Code:
<configuration>
<appSettings>
<add key="XBMC4LCDSmartie.Host" value="127.0.0.1"/>
<add key="XBMC4LCDSmartie.Port" value="9090"/>
<add key="XBMC4LCDSmartie.XBMCTestMode" value="TCP"/>
<add key="XBMC4LCDSmartie.RefreshInt" value="300"/>
</appSettings>
<startup useLegacyV2RuntimeActivationPolicy="true">
<supportedRuntime version="v4.0" />
</startup>
<runtime>
<loadFromRemoteSources enabled="true" />
</runtime>
</configuration>
Note the 'TCP' instead of 'Proc', as I read somewhere that if left at 'Proc' the plugin wouldn't be able to find XBMC as it's now Kodi.
Once I had added the runtime policy changes, I no longer got the plugin errors, but have a completely blank screen.
It almost like it's not communicating with Kodi at all.
I've gone into Kodi settings and tried changing the name from Kodi to XBMC and vice versa, made sure that the port is set to 80 with remote connection allowed and external control allowed etc, but nothing seems to work.
I know it's not a biggy and I could just leave the vfd showing the date and time and other stuff from LCDSmartie, but it would be really nice to see what Kodi is doing etc.
Not sure what else I can do now though, I know the vfd is working, LCDSmartie works fine on it, I just can't seem to get Kodi to communicate to the XBMC4LCDSmartie.dll or that to communicate with LCDSmartie.
Any ideas anyone?
TIA
efault
