Have you ever thought to develop a USB auxiliary display by your own? Ok, you might think it’s going to be a very tough project, but you’ve the wrong impression about it!

Many people have created million of auxiliary displays for computers and most of them are for commercial use! The majority of them are serial port based, and many of the ones that are USB based use a USB to serial converter. There are mostly expose the display to Windows through a virtual COM port.

The display that you’re going to create here is uses the PIC18F4550 with WinUSB and it don’t expose a virtual COM port at all! Basically, the display itself is a 128×64 parallel graphical model GDM12864H from SparkFun. The display will include a keypad and a bright backlight. As a result, it’s capable of displaying text, in either horizontal or vertical mode, and it can running in a pure graphical mode if you want it to be!

Since the PIC18F4550 is used to control the display and scan the keypad, thus both the PIC and the GDM12864H are power directly by the 5V USB bus. A basic Radio Shack enclosure is used to mount the display and the whole display is mounted to the top lid!