Comments on: Coby DP-151SX Hacking – LCD Extraction and Interrogation

By: endy

endy — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 12:29:11 +0000

here is the datasheet for the Varitronix display

http://www.varitronix-hk.com/uploads/product/prod_pdf/f1239091892.pdf

By: eric

eric — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 03:56:48 +0000

ZQ: I think the 2 pins at the bottom power the LED backlight. Looks like the same pins are all there just in a different order. It would take a bit of work with a scope to figure out what pin does what.

By: ZQ

ZQ — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 03:03:46 +0000

This is a photo of the board and connector. It looks very different from the one here.

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3431/3302638038_e413010785_b.jpg

By: eric

eric — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 19:39:29 +0000

That’s interesting. Can you put up some photos of the board? I would imagine the pinout is similar.

By: ZQ

ZQ — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 07:18:02 +0000

Hmm I got a couple of the coby DP-151’s but the circuit board seems to be different. The back casing of the unit indicates 151BW, and the LCD connector seems to have 29 pins instead of 27. Any idea if the pin numbers are the same?

By: eric

eric — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 01:19:43 +0000

You should be able to use any 8-bit micro. Note that the I/O voltage needs to be 3.0V, not 3.3V. The LCD display can’t operate at 3.3V according to the datasheet.

I picked the MAXQ2000 because I have one, and also because it’s a 16-bit micro with a hardware multiply-accumulate (good for graphics work).

Eventually I will post some routines I put together for drawing fonts, lines, bitmaps, and so forth.

By: Ray Alderman

Ray Alderman — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 16:55:45 +0000

Was there any particular reason you used the MAXQ2000 microcontroller, beyond having one laying around? I would like to do this with an AVR 8 bit controller, but want to make sure there isn’t anything funky I should know. Because it’s a parallel interface, the pin count is high for an 8bit, but that is OK for the application I have in mind.

Looking forward to any code samples and whatnot. Are you finding anything like fonts or basic shapes available in the PCF8833?

By: ElectricalEngineer

ElectricalEngineer — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 03:29:24 +0000

It is possible to do such a thing but as listed above it would be far more cost efficient to just buy a different display. part of the problem is that your working with a digital display, and you want to use analog signals. it would be possible with some conversion ICs or probably an FPGA but again wouldnt be cost efficient to do so. these are really neat displays im interested to see what cool projects are gonna be built.

By: Abby

Abby — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 21:58:02 +0000

I am interested in using a microcontroller to control which of the images in the digital frame’s memory will be displayed. Is there a very simple way to do this?

By: Gregory

Gregory — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 23:45:06 +0000

I dont think composite or something like that would work, if you had a microcontroller its almost a certainty that you could, but you would have to find out the pinout and the display protocol it uses, i would imagine it would be a fairly standardised one.