LCD panel (cont’d)

The magic of the Matrix Orbital LCD panels is in LCDC, the high-performance LCD driver. Essentially a 2nd-party application, LCDC is developed by an independent developer for the exclusive use with Matrix Orbital displays. Imagine Polyphony Digital (Gran Turismo) when they were still independent, and exclusively working for PlayStation. LCDC allows you to quickly and easily configure your Matrix Orbital MX2 while also giving you incredible room to customize the setup. If you bought bulk Matrix Orbital LCDs (say larger 4 line versions, or high-intensity vacuum fluorescent displays) you would need to spend $18 on LCDC. With the MX2 a full-registered version of LCDC is bundled.

Out of the box, you can easily configure your LCD panel to display information from Motherboard Monitor 5, ASE Game Server (All Seeing Eye – stats for all sorts of gaming servers), Usage monitor (uptime, CPU utilization), FRAPS, stock quotes, real-time news, Winamp 2 and 3 visualizations and even more. What makes LCDC so impressive is that you can check the box for Winamp 2 support and be done with it … or you can tweak exactly what is being displayed; if you wanted to keep track of your system temperature permanently, you can have the first row provide system information and the second row display the Winamp spectrum analyzer or track info.

The “ScreenBuilder” feature of LCDC is where everything gets done.

ScreenBuilder

It takes some getting used to, but it is drag and drop

Here you can define the different “screens” that get shown. You can set up the screen to show your custom logo (i.e. “Powered by FiringSquad.com”) initially and then start going through the different information screens. Perhaps you want to see the HDD usage, your RAM usage, uptime, or network activity. The customization goes even further because it is possible to choose how long or short each screen is. At first glimpse the customization can be daunting, but the documentation for LCDC and user forums are very helpful. The learning curve is perhaps 30 minutes, but it’s well worth the effort.

What’s missing out of the current version of LCDC is the ability to customize what is being displayed based upon the application that is being run. It’s possible to configure the system to only display WinAMP info while music is being played in WinAMP, and to cycle through the other screens when WinAMP isn’t running, but you cannot define that same kind of activity for your own applications though…

Or so I thought. While this feature isn’t part of the basic LCDC setup, there’s a free EXE plugin available. This plugin will monitor for a specific application and can trigger events. For example, when running Photoshop, I have my LCD show my real-time memory usage. When I exit Photoshop, it’ll return to the normally scheduled programming.

The customization process doesn’t have to be complicated though. For example, non-programmable budget LCD panels which emphasize fan speed, system temperature, or voltage monitoring. While this may be cool to have in overclocked systems, this is something I could care less about for this particular system. I am 100.0% confident in my power and cooling, and know that everything is fine – I don’t need to monitor that. What I do want is memory usage information, HDD status, and network status. For a file server, I may have the system cycle through all the HDD’s and report free space and drive temperature. Or in a demo system, maybe I just want the LCD for its bling-bling nature and have it display some animations when idle, and do WinAMP visualization and FRAPS. For these kinds of decisions, I can do it simply by checking boxes.