Picaxe to really big LCD's

[marcos.placona]

Ok Guys, I've been thinking big over the last couple of days. In fact I was thinking about building a digital photo frame using one of this big lcd displays in the market.

The one I came across was this one:

Which is a Sony PSP display with back-light integrated. The datasheet for it is here.

This is a massive display with 480px x 272px

LCD information

Manufacturer Sharp
Part No LQ043T3DX02
Interface 24-bit digital (8 bits/color)
Pixel Format 480x272
Size 4.3 inch (10.9 cm) 16:9 aspect ratio

Reading the datasheet, I found the pinout, which I'm attaching here so you can take a quick look on it

I'm not really sure it's possible, but the price for this LCD sure is tempting (£15).

I'm not the most "qualified" guy to talk about LCD's, although I've played with many of them in the past, but they were all "standard" lcd's, and this one is TFT and has some weird pins.

Any comment or help would be really appreciated, as well as the short comments like: "bottom line, not possible"

Thanks in advance for any comment.

 

[Dippy]

A helluva lot of work involved doing something from scratch Marcos. I'm not sure if people would be prepared to do the work for you there.
If you can't get drivers for it then I'd forget it mate. Hast thou Googled? I haven't.

Maybe WestAust can look into it? He's been working on a little GLCD and this is only 10,000 times harder.
My GLCD driver work was on 128x64 standard GLCDs which were much easier than this beast. It would be great if you could get it going but extra hardware and memory would be required... and then you'd want pretty pictures as well eh?

Of course its possible with the right gubbins... but for you to drive it direct from a PICAXE, no way.

 

[marcos.placona]

A helluva lot of work involved doing something from scratch Marcos. I'm not sure if people would be prepared to do the work for you there.
If you can't get drivers for it then I'd forget it mate. Hast thou Googled? I haven't.

Maybe WestAust can look into it? He's been working on a little GLCD and this is only 10,000 times harder.
My GLCD driver work was on 128x64 standard GLCDs which were much easier than this beast. It would be great if you could get it going but extra hardware and memory would be required... and then you'd want pretty pictures as well eh?

Of course its possible with the right gubbins... but for you to drive it direct from a PICAXE, no way.

That's where I wanted to get to

I've googled a lot about it, and while some people say it's possible, others say it's not, so I think I'm sticking to the second group. I'd be happy to write a driver for that, but I think it's just a massive overkill.

In the meantime, would you guys suggest a nice GLCD (even if it's smaller), that I can securely play with. I've been having some great ideas over the last few days, but still didn't find the right LCD to do that. I've been following westaust's posts, but his GLCD is B & W, and I wanted a colour one.

Manuks has posted something about the usage of GLCD's, but the ones he used are totally expensive.

Thanks for the quick answer Dippy

 

[Dippy]

"totally expensive", well you can't buy them in parts. I feel a 'dude' coming on...

Your options:
1. hack like WA did.
2. Buy a standard GLCD. More expensive and remember they are NOT always compatible. Some cheap Ebay varieties (even with same pinout) will not be compatible with more expensive ones like Rev-Ed sell.
Fact not fiction btw.
3. Buy a nice juicy colour lcd with driver... just kidding, you couldn't afford it.

It is possible to hack some of the smaller/older mobile phone colour GLCDs. But the later ones are are bigger, faster and need far better driving than you could do with PICAXE.
Sadly, the mobile phone GLCD designers don't have PIC/PICAXE hackers in mind when they put pencil to paper.

Maybe Wa has researched colour GLCDs? I have only done a little dabbling, but that was with a different processor which isn't relevant here.

 

[marcos.placona]

"totally expensive", well you can't buy them in parts. I feel a 'dude' coming on...

Your options:
1. hack like WA did.
2. Buy a standard GLCD. More expensive and remember they are NOT always compatible. Some cheap Ebay varieties (even with same pinout) will not be compatible with more expensive ones like Rev-Ed sell.
Fact not fiction btw.
3. Buy a nice juicy colour lcd with driver... just kidding, you couldn't afford it.

It is possible to hack some of the smaller/older mobile phone colour GLCDs. But the later ones are are bigger, faster and need far better driving than you could do with PICAXE.
Sadly, the mobile phone GLCD designers don't have PIC/PICAXE hackers in mind when they put pencil to paper.

Maybe Wa has researched colour GLCDs? I have only done a little dabbling, but that was with a different processor which isn't relevant here.

Dippy, it's not a matter of "you can afford or you can't", and I find it's always very difficult to discuss this kind of stuff with you, as you seem to be always very harsh with people wanting to save a few £££

Maybe not your case, but most of us like to do their own stuff. I could just go and buy a digital photo-frame @ Argos for a couple of tenners, but wouldn't have the same fun as "DIYing" it. Well that's my nature, I like to have the challenge, I've built my own etching tank instead of buying one already made (which would probably be cheaper than the one I built, but hey where's the fun on that?).

I do understand you are against "el cheapos", and stuff made on china, but being a hobbyist (I do it for fun, and not for living), that's pretty much the kind of stuff I can afford. You can't always pay 100 quid in an LCD display if you have "approximately" the same thing for a fraction of that.

Are they realiable? Not at all, but hey, you get what you paid for, and if you end up with something working, off you go.

Well anyway... I'll keep looking for the GLCD's and shall come back with something.

 

[Dippy]

"Dippy, it's not a matter of "you can afford or you can't", and I find it's always very difficult to discuss this kind of stuff with you, as you seem to be always very harsh with people wanting to save a few £££"

- oh, please don't get me wrong. I'm not against DIY as I'm a keen DIyer. I don't mean to be harsh...maybe a touch ironic sometimes.
I said 'you can't afford it' because pukka driver boards are darned expensive and I was teasing a bit. I couldn't afford it either.

I'm not against stuff made in China per se (period). 99% of GLCDs are made in China. But there's good and bad. And bad is usually cheap. And cheap usually means anonymous and Ebay. And this usually results in prolonged postings about 'My widget won't work my PICAXE is broken'. Not referring to you here btw.


I've got nothing against hacking stuff and economising. No probs. Good on you. It saves money and waste. But I've seen several cases where people will spend a tenner to save a fiver.

And I agree with you, in many cases Good Enough is perfect.

Anyway, OT already. Enough. I'm sure you'll find a suitable product.

PS. Check out Rapid electronics for a cheapish bench PSU 0-30V 10 Amps. No, its not made by TTi but may be fine for a lot of apps. They have a sale today.

 

[hippy]

Unless someone's already done it and shows it working then in my experience it's not even worth bothering with unless you want to be the one who shows it can be done and are prepared to put the hard work into doing that.

When it comes to driving an LCD like this it's far more than a PICAXE can handle; it needs a dedicated controller to bang-out each pixel in real time and you'll need memory to hold the pixel data; 24-bit, 480x272, approx 1MB, although you can sacrifice things and reduce the capabilities; 16-colour, 80x25 text would be just 1K but then the controller gets more complicated.

If you just want a large digital picture frame I'd sit back and wait for prices to fall. Once you add your own hardware it's going to undoubtedly be more expensive than some far eastern offering.

Or better still, buy a $5 laptop and start dismantling the case.

 

[moxhamj]

Good point hippy. You do reach a point where the project grows and grows and suddenly a second hand laptop ends up cheaper.

But the LCD market is changing rapidly, probably due to the mobile phone market driving prices down. Even if you did have an LCD and you drove it with simple instructions like "turn pixel x,y to colour r,g,b", I shudder to think what the software would look like in picaxe. Maybe you might manage to turn enough pixels on to display one icon before you ran out of code.

You need a lot of ram to read in and out bitmaps and draw windows and display fonts. Then again, I wonder what Rev Ed have in the pipeline?

 

[westaust55]

BIG LCD's and colour gLCD's ex mobile phones

"totally expensive", well you can't buy them in parts. I feel a 'dude' coming on...

Your options:
1. hack like WA did.
2. Buy a standard GLCD. More expensive and remember they are NOT always compatible. Some cheap Ebay varieties (even with same pinout) will not be compatible with more expensive ones like Rev-Ed sell.
Fact not fiction btw.
3. Buy a nice juicy colour lcd with driver... just kidding, you couldn't afford it.

It is possible to hack some of the smaller/older mobile phone colour GLCDs. But the later ones are are bigger, faster and need far better driving than you could do with PICAXE.
Sadly, the mobile phone GLCD designers don't have PIC/PICAXE hackers in mind when they put pencil to paper.

Maybe WA has researched colour GLCDs? I have only done a little dabbling, but that was with a different processor which isn't relevant here.

One thing to keep in mind with mobile phone LCD’s is that higher resolution does not always mean a physically bigger display. The Nokia 3310 at 84 x 48 is roughly the same size as the Siemens A55 at 101 x 64. Some 128 x 128 colour LCD's are only marginally bigger.

I think that a PICAXE is about at the limits of its capabilities to directly drive a monochrome LCD of the sort of resolution I and others have been working with. The number of available variables and the amount of available memory are key factors in that.

I have already been thinking about adding a Ramtron FM24C16A 2kByte FRAM type i2c memory as a buffer for use with these smaller gLCD’s. Sure there will be some delays reading and writing data but it would take a lot of complication out of the maths and enable plotting of crossing lines without loss of data from previous lines. Even the A55 with a monochrome 101 x 64 pixel resolution would need a buffer of 808 bytes, so the FM24C16A is a good option and comes in SOIC8 package (can use one of the SOIC8 to DIP8 adapters I have) and will drop into a socket on the PICAXE AXE111 data-logger memory expansion board or other similar socket/adapter/board.

One thing that I have noted, is that most of those using mobile phone gLCD’s are driving them with their desktop PC via the printer port where power, speed, variables and memory are relatively unlimited by comparison. Just look at many of the U-Tube vide clips and info on other websites. Not many outside this forum are using BASIC as the programming language.


I have a LG C1100 LCD colour display (gained for free) which has a 128 x 128 resolution. I have found the schematics and know it has a 16 lines for parallel data comms. Have not yet found anything on the driver. The connector to the LCD cable is a 34 pin plug with dimension of about 5mm x 3mm – where’s that electron microscope.


I have previously found the attached data relating to Nokia 6610 and 7210 mobiles with 128 x 128 resolution 4096 colour LCDs. Roll on finding a cheap/free colour Nokia.
Two displays are used by Nokia - The Philips one uses the PCF8833 and the Epson a S1D15G00.
The Epson one has a couple of problems - It's internal charge pump responds to light if the controller is not covered, and it’s very picky when it comes to voltages and contrast. The Philips module is far better and has a set of 11 large gold-plated contacts compared to the connects for most of these colour LCD GSM mobiles. It is apparently easy to identify which type of Nokia LCD you have as the Philips one has a brown/orange flexible printed ribbon cable while the Epson's flexible ribbon cable is green.

Tonight spotted at Sparkfun a Nokia 6110 LCD module:
http://www.sparkfun.com/tutorial/Nokia 6100 LCD Display Driver.pdf

This Sparkfun manual duplicates a lot of what I have tracked down elsewhere.
While the Sparkfun module manual has code in C, there is still a lot of useful information for PICAXE programmers. I note the Sparkfun data indicates these Nokia colour LCD’s as 132 x 132 pixel resolution as opposed to 128 x 128.