Introduction

   LCDs are becoming increasingly popular on computers, as they have many uses. For server administrators, whose systems often don't have a dedicated monitor or display, a simple LCD on the front of the case can provide brief yet useful information in a glance.

   Or, with the advent of different coloured backlights making their way into the PC LCD market, an LCD can add a great looking and functional touch to one's case. In the same respect, an LCD can display things that may be considered mundane by some, such as CPU and memory utilization, or notifications of new e-mail, or other more exciting things like visualization for an MP3 player.

   In short, with the proper LCD and software, an LCD can display almost anything you want it to. In addition, some LCDs include a keypad interface that can accept input - increasing the usefulness of the LCD many times; not only can you read what's on the display, but with the proper input you can manipulate the LCD and make it tell you what you want to see - you can also send commands directly to the system via this input, again, given the proper LCD software.

   Picking the right LCD can be a little hard. If you're like me, then you're lazy and not too good with electronics, so this precluded me from buying a LCD and wiring it myself. What can I say? I have my limitations.

   So then, in my case, I was looking for a ready-made LCD that just needed to be plugged in and installed in a drive bay. But you still have to be careful, as some of this ready-made solutions leave out amenities that could be present if one had the know-how (that I don't possess) to put one together by oneself.

   Looking around on the Internet for LCDs for any period of time should get you acquainted with the name Matrix Orbital. Based in Canada, this group claims to be the "Home of the World's Finest Serial Interface Displays", and after reading reviews of their displays, I'm apt to believe this statement. Heck, one only needs to read Ript's review of the MX212 LCD from PPCs to understand that their LCDs are a modder's dream, thanks in part to their extra features such as the keypad interface and GPOs (General Purpose Outputs).

   With MO's displays being paired with LCDC, widely considered to be the best LCD driver software out there, it's easy to see that you have a winning combo. But, despite these LCDs being easy to setup and get running, getting the most out of the LCD and the LCDC software can be a somewhat daunting task, especially if you're wanting to use the additional features of the LCD or if you're heavily into customizing what you want to see on your LCD. So today, hopefully I'll be able to help you, at least a little, on getting the most out of your Matrix Orbital MX2 LCD.

The LCD

   The MX2 LCD is based on the LK202-24-USB model, and it's basically this model LCD mounted in an excellent and sturdy drive bay insert. There are many different backlight/drive bay insert combinations, and I suggest you take a look at the options to find which one you like best. Though the aluminum faceplates go well with brushed (silver) aluminum cases, they do not have a keypad to use with the LK202-24-USB's keypad interface; this, IMO, is a quite a substantial loss, as the keypad is very useful in manipulating what's displayed on the LCD. I would suggest sticking to either the black or beige model with the keypad; the black goes well with darker-coloured cases, while the beige still matches fairly well with silver cases and probably most of your 5.25" drives' faceplates.

   As for LCD backlight options, there's the standard green for traditionalists, or something more contemporary such as grey/white (more of a light turquoise backlight), or inverse blue (white on dark blue), my personal favorite.

MX212 w/ keypad on left, MX221 with aluminum faceplate on right.

The keypad connection is at the bottom; GPOs on the left.

  Regardless of what you pick, all the MX2 LCDs are USB, and will connect to any USB port on your computer; they are still serial displays but the included driver creates a virtual COM Port on your system, and so then any compatible serial-LCD driver software can send data to this COM Port, whose driver then routes the data through to the USB interface. Pretty sweet eh?

   MO also makes an internal header cable; with this, you can remove the external cable and instead connect the display directly to a USB header on your motherboard, negating the need to run a cable through your case and out the back to a USB port. This internal header doesn't have separate connectors, but rather the pins and connector are separate, so that you only need to figure out or configure the proper position for each wire once as you push it into the connector; the single connector can then easily be plugged into a USB header on your mobo.

The MX221, because of the aluminum faceplate, doesn't have a keypad.

USB internal header cable; only needs to be set once.

   As mentioned before, the MX2 LCDs come with LCDC - this software isn't free so you know you're getting a complete package from Matrix Orbital. While it's true that LCDC can be hard to get started with, once you get going you can really customize and get the mouse out of your LCD. Now, LCDC does come with a default setup that can get you up and running, but I'm sure that you want to get into customizing the display, don't you?

MX2's keypad.

4 buttons on the left...

... and 3 on the right.

Using LCDC

   After installing LCDC, it should be able to automatically detect the proper LCD. In my case, it detected the LCD as an LK202-25-USB, when in fact the model should have been LK202-24-USB; this was a really minor problem as there isn't any functional difference between the two models other than the former support up to a 25-key keypad interface, and the latter supporting a 24-key interface.

   I should also add that LCDC worked fine with the automatic detection of the LCD as the -25 model, with absolutely no problems suffered. LCDC works with many different displays from Matrix Orbital and each needs its own definition file because of the different ways each accepts input, so that is why it's important to have LCDC select the right model. I should add that I downloaded the latest version from LCDC's site, 1.03.23 as of the time of this writing. As long as you have the serial from the LCDC software CD that came with the MO LCD, you'll be able to use all the new versions of LCDC without problem.

Autodetection works great!

Icons in the bottom represent plugins active.

Contrast/Backlight settings.

   Now you'll want to properly configure your display. I found the default contrast to be good, but the backlight intensity didn't need to be at 100%; I found that for the "inverse blue" MX212, I could turn down the intensity to 55% and not suffer any viewing problems. The MO displays have a pretty damn decent range of viewing angles so that definitely helps. One downside to the MX212 is that the inverse blue setup dictates that the backlight always be on; it's pretty much impossible to see anything on the display otherwise.

   The first page of configuration deals with data formatting mainly. The decimal precision is of importance, especially if you'll be displaying numerical values like CPU usage, memory usage and the like. You don't want too many decimals being displayed. The default FPS of the LCDC, 4fps, is decent for most applications; this can be changed on a specific basis, say for a winamp visualization or some other animation, all the way up to 25fps, which yields the highest CPU usage. Even when using the LCDC at 25fps, I didn't notice any high CPU usage problems.

Configuration page 1.

Configuration page 2.

LCDC's e-mail settings.

  The plugin section is where it gets interesting. LCDC has a built in capability to display mostly information about your system, but utilizes plugins to display a wide range of information, ranging from Motherboard Monitor shared data, to stock ticker prices/quotes. The advantage of this is that as long as someone knows how to write a plugin, they can do so, adding any sorts of features to LCDC.

   The default install of LCDC comes with many plugins. Before you can use any of them though, you'll have to enable them in this section. LCDC currently supports up to 15 concurrent plugins; this is more than enough for me! I found quite a few from the included set that I really liked; Motherboard Monitor 5 (of course), Multimedia, RSS Feed support, Stock Quote Ticker, Winamp 2, and Weather forecasts. Once you enable them, they'll show up as icons at the bottom of the main window as seen above. With just these plugins, I found there was a lot of information to be displayed, as we'll see later. A lot of the plugins require Internet access, so if you have a personal firewall program you'll need to give LCDC outbound access.

Plugins must be enabled.

GPO setup.