Posted on May 17, 2011 at 13:28Now to your questions:
1. you need to understand the code a bit, cut it in logical pieces and assemble together. This will help you to cut-and-paste the SPI initialization, the communication and connecting your SPI routines with the LCD driver. I'd personally start with the SPI example, test it (highly recommend some two-channel memory scope) and when you are sure the display might get the data, wrap the SPI driver with the LCD stuff.
2. the make file is needed for command-line tools. The IDEs call the cmpiler and linker dynamically and assemble the ''command line'' depending on the content of project tree... The ST library doesn't contain any makefile, because you need to create it for your own program, anyway.
My advice - download Raisonance RIDE, IAR EWB or Keil uVision2 with their demo compilers and learn these tools. Otherwise your life will be much more difficult...
The library contains start-up files, linker files and ready-to-use project templates for all these environments, so the start-up is: open the project template, add your own source files and path to your header files, compile and go!
The library itself is not difficult to compile, supposing you add all needed source files and have well set path to header files.
3. don't see the driver in the Windows scope - it won't publish anything to you automatically. See the peripheral driver ONLY as a set of functions, constants and variables (together called API), that you can use in YOUR OWN program.
In the end, your program is a set of your .c files, compiled together with ST (and other) library .c or .obj files into one binary file (well, you can place it into more pieces of memory, but it's more complicated to explain).
You need to understand, that there is NO operating system behind - your code has a start-up code (usually hidden by a compiler RTL library), its own interrupt vectors and handlers etc. So YOUR program is heart of the system, nothing behind (again, you have the possibility to run some simple OSs, but your case is described above absolutely).
4. once you add all the files together and include their header files, call the HW initialization functions (for clocks, GPIO configuration, SPI configuration etc.), then call the LCD driver initialization function (that would call many SPI send functions) and finally call some LCD function, that can display a text.
If you get lost in the functions, don't be afraid of looking into their source code, and go deeper and deeper until you understand, what actually happens in the SW. At some point you'll meet your LCD datasheet on the other side of your search :D
