VFD - Vacuum Fluorescent Display

I found some VFDs on ebay and i thought, that would be a great replacement to the USB LCD - bigger and brighter. 

These were NCR 5972s, these are great as they are RS232 controlled (which  is why i needed to add some extra RS232 ports in an earlier post).

I used this document i found for the pinouts.  www.maltepoeggel.de/html/vfd/vfd_ncr5972.pdf

Initially i wrote the code below on the Mac, but the serial to usb dongles i had didnt like the length of time they were running and died/crashed after a few hours runtime.   On the linux box it has been running for days no problem.

Adding a 4 port RS232 serial pci card to ubuntu

I bought a 4 port RS232 serial card for my box, the supplier said it was Linux supported.

Though as you can see before it wasn't that clear cut, some fiddling was needed - pretty much like how most devices needed setting in the old Linux days...  before user friendly linux distros.

It said it has Sun1040 chips???  Does that mean anything to anyone?  LOL  As you can see below Linux thinks it is "LSI Logic / Symbios Logic" so not Sun 1040...

Look for the card...

root@ubuntu:~# lspci