LCD Screen Windows Are This Summer’s Hottest Case Mod

Case modding took off in the late 90s, and taught us all that computers could (and should!) look awesome. Much of the aesthetic went mainstream, and now tons of computer cases come with lights and windows and all the rest. [WysWyg_Protogen] realized those simple case windows could be way cooler with a neat LCD hack, and set to work.

The concept is simple. Take an old LCD monitor, remove the backlight and extraneous hardware, and then install it to the window in a computer case. When lit from behind via LEDs in the case, the screen creates a ghostly display through which the computer’s internals can still partially be seen. It’s a really compelling effect, and in theory, quite easy to achieve. All one need do is mount the stripped-down screen to the case and pipe it video from the graphics card.

In practice, it’s a little tricky. Disassembling the screen and removing things like the anti-glare coating can be tough to do without damaging the delicate panel inside. The windows typically used on computer cases can dull the effect, too. However, [WysWyg_Protogen] is continuing to tinker with the project and the results are getting increasingly impressive with each iteration. It doesn’t photograph too well, but it looks truly amazing in motion.

We often forget LCDs are transparent in their basic form, as we generally only use them with backlights or reflective backers. They really do look great when used in this transmissive way, though. Video after the break.

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Odd Inputs And Peculiar Peripherals: RoenDi Smart Knob Thinks Outside The Box

When it comes to design decisions, we’re often advised to “think outside the box.” It’s generally good advice, if a bit abstract — it could really mean anything. But it appears that someone took it quite literally with this nifty little smart knob display and input device.

[Dimitar]’s inspiration for RoenDi — for “rotary encoder and display” — came from an unusual source: a car dashboard, and specifically, the multipurpose knobs that often crop up in a car’s climate control cluster. Designed for ease of use while driving while causing as little distraction as possible, such knobs often combine a rotary encoder with one or more indicators or buttons. RoenDi builds on that theme by putting a 1.7″ round LCD display in the middle of a ring attached to an Alps rotary encoder, allowing the knob to be customized for whatever you want it to represent. The backplane sports a powerful STM32 microcontroller with a lot of the GPIO pins broken out, so customization and interfacing are limited only by your imagination. The design is open source, so you can either build your own or support the project via Crowd Supply.

Unlike the haptic smart knob we’ve been seeing a bit about lately, which also features a round LCD at its center, RoenDi’s feedback is via the physical detents on the encoder. We think both devices are great, and they fill different niches in the novel input ecosystem.

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DIY Night Vision, Where Four Is Better Than Two

Night vision projects are great, and the hardware available to hobbyists just gets better and better. [Just Call Me Koko] shows off just such a build using four low-light, IR-sensitive cameras, four displays, and four lenses in 3D printed enclosures mounted to a helmet. Why four? Well, mounting two cameras and displays per eye is the easiest way to yield a wider field of view, and for bonus points, it sure looks extra weird.

At its heart, each of the four segments is the same. A Foxeer Night Cat 3 camera is mounted at the front, its output is connected directly to a 2″ diagonal NTSC/PAL display, and at the rear is a DCX (double convex) lens 38 mm in diameter with a 50 mm focal length. Add a printed enclosure, and the result is a monocular night vision display. Do it three more times and arrange them around one’s eyeballs, and one can make a night vision system with a panoramic view that probably takes only a little getting used to.

How well does it work? [Just Call Me Koko] does some walking around and also tries some target practice while wearing them, and concludes that while they don’t have nearly the clarity of the real deal (the 320×240 resolution displays limit the details one can perceive), they do work fairly well for what they are. Also, the cost of parts is a small fraction of the cost of the real thing, making it a pretty enjoyable project in the end.

The kind of hardware available to hobbyists today is what makes this kind of night vision project accessible, but there’s always the good old high-voltage analog method.

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An In-Depth Look At The Haptic Smart Knob

At Hackaday, we love those times when we get a chance to follow up on a project that we’ve already featured. Generally, it’s because the project has advanced in some significant way, which is always great to see. Sometimes, though, new details on the original project are available, and that’s where we find ourselves with [Scott Bez] and his haptic smart knob project.

Alert readers may recall [Scott]’s announcement of this project back in March. It made quite a splash, with favorable comments and a general “Why didn’t I think of that?” vibe. And with good reason; the build quality is excellent, and the idea is simple yet powerful. By attaching a knob to the shaft of a brushless DC motor and mounting a small circular LCD screen in the middle, [Scott] came up with an input device that could be reprogrammed on the fly. The BLDC can provide virtual detents at any interval while generating haptic feedback for button pushes, and the LCD screen can provide user feedback.

But how is such a thing built? That’s the subject of the current video, which has a ton of neat design details and build insights. The big challenge for [Scott] was supporting the LCD screen in the middle of the knob while still allowing the knob — and the motor — to rotate. Part of the solution was, sadly, a hollow-shaft motor that was out of stock soon after he released this project; hopefully a suitable replacement will be available soon. Another neat feature is the way [Scott] built tiny strain gauges into the PCB itself, which pick up the knob presses that act as an input button. We also found the way button press haptics are provided by a quick jerk of the motor shaft very clever.

This is one of those projects that seems like a solution waiting for a problem, and something that you’d build just for the coolness factor. Hats off to [Scott] for following up a sweet build with equally juicy details.

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Hacking A New Display Into A Fluke 8050A Multimeter

Old lab equipment was often built to last, and can give decades of service when treated properly. It’s often so loved that when one part fails, it’s considered well worth repairing rather than replacing with something newer. [Michael] did just that, putting in the work to give his Fluke 8050A multimeter a shiny new display.

The Fluke 8050A is a versatile device, capable of measuring voltage, current, and resistance in addition to decibels at various impedences and conductance, too. The original display doesn’t show some of the finer details so well, so [Michael] elected to improve on that when he installed a new 2.2″ graphical LCD to replace the basic 7-segment LCD that originally came with the hardware.

To achieve the install, the original LCD display module was removed from the chassis. A piggyback device that sits under the Fluke’s microcontroller was then used to break out signals for the new graphical LCD without requiring modification to the meter’s PCB itself. An Atmega32u4 microcontroller then takes in these signals, and then drives the graphical LCD accordingly.

It’s a great hack that makes the old multimeter easier to use, and the new white-on-green display is far kinder on the eyes, too. We’ve seen other multimeters get screen transplants before, too. Of course, if you’re new to the world of segmented LCDs and want to learn more about how they work, [Joey Castillo]’s talk from last year’s Remoticon will get you up to speed!

Pushing The Limits Of A 16×2 LCD With Bad Apple!!

While low-contrast, blue-on-slightly-less-blue 16-character by 2-line LCDs are extremely popular, they really are made specifically for alphanumeric use. They do an admirable job of displaying a few characters, but they don’t exactly spring to mind as a display for non-character purposes. But displaying video on a 16×2 LCD is possible, as long as you’re willing to stretch the definition of “video” a bit and use some imagination while watching.

Normally, a 16×2 display can only display a single character in each spot, chosen from a fixed character set. But [arduinocelantano] was able to leverage the eight custom character slots the display allows to build up images from arbitrary 5×8 pixel bitmaps. After using ffmpeg to scale the original video to a viewport of eight characters, a Python program was used to turn every frame of the scaled video into code to generate the custom bitmaps for each chunk of the viewport. Even with the low refresh rate of the display and the shrunken frame size, the result is a recognizable video, helped no doubt by the choice of the shadow-puppet Bad Apple!! video. Check it out after the break to see how it looks.

We saw a similar rendering of the same video on LCD a while back; that effort was amazing in that it was an EEPROM-only implementation, along with a somewhat bigger LCD with better contrast. That project served as inspiration for [arduinocelantano]’s build here, which in some ways we think looks a bit better — perhaps it’s the inverted pixels. Either way, hats off to both builders for pushing past the normal constraints and teaching us something interesting.

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Round LCDs Put To Work In Rack Mount Gauge Cluster

Like many of you, we’re intrigued by the possibilities offered by the availability of affordable round LCD panels. But beyond the smartwatches they were designed for, it’s not always easy to come up with an appropriate application for such non-traditional displays. Digital “steam gauges” are one of the first ideas that come to mind, so it’s perhaps no surprise that’s the direction [Tom Dowad] took his project. But rather than just one or two gauges, he decided to go all out and put eight of them in a 1U rack mountable unit.

What do you need eight faux-analog gauges for? Beats us, but that’s not our department. Now [Tom] has a whole row of indicators that can be used to show whatever it is he likes to keep an eye on. The fact that the device is actually controlled via MIDI may provide us a clue that there’s a musical component at play (no pun intended), but then, it wouldn’t be the first time we’d seen MIDI used simply as a convenient and well supported way of synchronizing gadgets. Continue reading “Round LCDs Put To Work In Rack Mount Gauge Cluster”