Author write:As with the FPGA board previously, the connections are made by soldering standard IDC ribbon cable directly to the glass substrate.As the PIC will not work from 3.3V, I had to make a power supply for the LCD. For this I used an LM317, is complete overkill but easy and quick. Both LCD supply pins are tied to the output, which is around 3.0V. All four signal lines have 10K resistors in series, to protect the LCD inputs from the 5V signalling of the PIC.[read]

The current concept incorporates a wireless transmitter and receiver and is thought to be used for remote controlled airplanes or appliances with two seperate parts. In other words, we have one dedicated transmitter (acquisition, filtering) and one dedicated receiver part (user-interface, look-up table, calibration, storage), capable of being connected together with any physical layer, e.g. wired, wireless, infrared. If you want to build a standalone altimeter/variometer just for hiking or mountaineering, this setup can obviously be simplified by omitting the wireless components.The following components have been used: Analog to digital converter NSC ADC12130, a Microchip PIC16F84 controller, a quad op-amp NSC LMC660, a Maxim MAX232 RS232 level shifter, and the Motorola MPXS4100A absolute pressure sensor.[read]