Reverse Engineering A Nokia LCD

March 8, 2012 by 16 Comments

LCD displays taken from old Nokia phones have been a staple of the hardware makers for years now, so we’re very happy to see [Andy] reverse engineering a full color QVGA display so we can move our grayscale projects over to a full-color display.

The screen in a Nokia 2730, 5000, and 7100 cell phone is a wonder of technology – its 18-bit color with a very high-resolution piqued [Andy]’s interest. He bought a second-hand Nokia 2730 off of eBay and started taking it apart. After checking out the schematics for the phone, [Andy] had a few breakout boards made; especially useful since he found a few connectors as well.

With a great deal of Googling, [Andy] found another lost soul who successfully broke into a similar LCD display and discovered it was command-compatible with a Magnachip LCD controller. The only way forward was to send a few of these commands over to the display and watch what happens.

[Andy] managed get pixels drawn on the screen, and found a few interesting features: hardware scrolling is enabled, as is changing between portrait or landscape orientations. From a second-hand phone on eBay, [Andy] now has a very nice QVGA display. We’re calling this a win, but you can judge the video after the break for yourself.

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Up Your FPGA Game By Learning From This LCD Control Prototype

February 22, 2012 by 10 Comments

[Cesar] recently got a PSP display up and running with his FPGA development board. That’s a nice project, but what we really like is that he set aside a lot of time to show how it’s done every step of the way. This isn’t just a tutorial on that particular screen, but an overview of the skill set needed to get any piece of hardware working.

The screen itself is a Sharp LQ043T3DX02; a 480×272 TFT display with 16 million colors. Not bad for your project but when you start looking into the control scheme this isn’t going to be like using a Nokia screen with an Arduino. It takes twenty pins to control it; Red, green, and blue take sixteen pins, four pins are used for control, the rest are CK, DISP, Hsync, Vsync.

Wisely, [Cesar] designs his own interface board which includes the connector for the ribbon cable. It also has drivers for the screen’s backlight and supplies power to the device. With hardware setup complete he digs into the datasheets. We just love it that he details how to get the information you’re looking for out of this document, and shows his method of turning that first into a flow chart and then into code for the FPGA.

Converting Transparency Sheets To An LCD Monitor

February 4, 2012 by 37 Comments

Apparently, there’s some sort of sporting event being televised this weekend that has been historically used as an excuse to buy a big-screen TV. [Joel] wanted a huge-screen TV on the cheap, so he converted an overhead projector to something he can use with his XBox.

Using a bare LCD panel with an overhead projector is a decades-old hack we’ve covered before. The basic idea is fairly simple, but we’ve never seen anything that could be considered a semi-permanent build. [Joel] started his project by picking up a surplus overhead projector for $25 and routing a cutting board to mount the LCD in. The bulb in the projector added a lot of heat, so three small fans are used to blow air between the projector glass and the LCD display.

[Joel] started off looking at the LumenLab DIY projector project, but considered that to be a terrible amount of work with a fairly high initial investment. If you don’t count the few LCDs [Joel] burned through while building his project, his projector was built for under $100. We’re loving the result and are sure it will be much appreciated at [Joel]’s LAN parties.

Making A Privacy Monitor From An Old LCD

November 25, 2011 by 94 Comments

privacy-screen

[dimovi] had a spare LCD monitor sitting around and thought it would be great to convert it into a “privacy” monitor.

The process is simple enough for anyone comfortable with disassembling electronics. He took apart the monitor’s plastic frame, cutting out the polarized film with a utility knife. Once the film was removed, he spent some time removing the film adhesive from the glass panel using a combination of Oops cleaner and paint thinner.

He reassembled the monitor, which now shines a bright white regardless of what is actually being displayed on the screen. He removed the lenses from a pair of theater 3D glasses, replacing the plastic with the film he removed from the monitor.

Now, [dimovi] is the only one who can see what’s he is doing on his computer, which is just the way he likes it.

While there’s not a lot of magic going on behind the process, we think it’s a neat way to reuse an old monitor.

Using An LCD’s Poor Viewing Angle To Your Advantage

October 24, 2011 by 17 Comments

Early LCD monitors had some pretty awful issues when not viewed from directly in front of the screen. These days the technology has really minimized this flaw, but if you still have a cheap monitor on hand you might want to pull it out and give this hack a try. [Chris Harrison] is using oblique viewing angles to display additional information on cheap montiors.

Take a look at the two images above. The one on the left is taken from directly in front of the monitor and looks normal. But if you view the same screen from the side, the financial information is obscured. This is by design. Using very light colors, the obscuring characters are almost indiscernible from straight on, but you can just see them there a little bit (they look like burn-in does on a CRT screen). But from the side, these light colors become quite bold and blend with the rest of the data on the screen.

This works because of the polarizing filters on an LCD screen. You might want to watch [Bill Hammack] explain how an LCD works if you’re not familiar. Because the viewing angle color changes are a flaw and not a feature, manufacturers make the up-and-down angles the worst to improve on side-to-side viewing. [Chris’] experiments play into that by using a computer monitor on its side. Check out the video after the break to see some of the different applications that he uses this for.

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LCD Backpack: From Arduino Board To Homemade Pcb

October 17, 2011 by 7 Comments

[Kaushlesh Chandel] prototyped a few projects on his Arduino that use an HD44780 Character LCD. Wanting to keep these projects in one piece, but not sacrifice his Arduino board, so he etched his own LCD backpack that is Arduino compatible. If you’ve never made it past the Arduino board to build a module that only uses the parts you need for a project, this is a great source of inspiration for you to give it a try.

The design that [Kaushlesh] drew up is quite simple. It connects directly to the single in-line header of the character LCD. It looks like he’s using the 4-bit mode for addressing that display, which leaves you with quite a few pins (both digital and analog) to work with in the future. The important components rolled into his design are the chip itself, an ATmega8/168/328, the crystal to make sure it is running at the correct speed for Arduino timing, and a trimpot for adjusting the contrast on the display. The final feature you’ll want to be sure to include in your own design is a pin header for programming the chip via an FTDI cable.

Never etched your own PCB before? Give our PCB fab tutorial a try.

Character LCD Spectrum Analyzer Made Simple With A Dedicated IC

October 10, 2011 by 10 Comments

[El Artis] just finished building an audio spectrum analyzer that uses a character LCD. The uses an Arduino to drive the display, but unlike other meters that use the microcontroller for analysis, [El Artis] is using a discrete IC for that task.

This project uses the MSGEQ7 graphic equilizer display filter chip to grab frequency data from the audio source. The chip connects to your microcontroller of choice using two digital pins and one analog pin. [El Artis] points us to [J Skoba’s] post about how to use it with an Arduino, then adds his own custom character routines for an HD44780 display. You’ll notice that there are sixteen bars in the image above, which conflicts with the 7 outputs the chip offers. [El Artis] averages neighboring values in order to add the extra outputs.

Don’t miss the demo video after the break. If you’re looking to use this part in one of your projects, we noticed they’re a little hard to find (octopart doesn’t return any suppliers) but SparkFun has them.

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