Hitachi lcd From Psion Revo

I found an old psion revo and though Why not lets take it apart
i found some good goodies in there but i was mostly after the 480x160 Monochrome lcd
so i disassembled it from the main board and it is a hitachi lcd
ive looked for a while now but ive had no luck finding a driver for this lcd
it has 20 pins and it says HITACHI SR12H002-RZA

You could always take a look at the Linux driver (since it is possible to run Linux on the Psion Revo, according to Google at least).

Good luck figuring it out.

The Arduino does not have enough grunt or memory to control that LCD display.

// Per.

TL:DR - I disagree Zapro. While not the ideal option, an Arduino could actually be made to drive this screen. It would be pretty crappy though.

I know I am picking up on an old thread, but I just picked up a huge stack of these displays tonight. A friend of our hackerspace is moving their business of more than 10 years. They started out there writing software for Psion and doing hardware repairs. They had lots of cases, keyboard mats and a few boxes of repair glass, both new in packaging and loose. There were 3 or 4 boards as well, but I was stupid and did not take them X<

I had hoped the Hitachi SP14H001 had a built in driver, but after pulling one apart, I see that it does not. It is just rows and columns with some sort of decoding scheme.

I will be posting more as I start to uncover, but I would really hesitate to say it can't be done, and that the arduino cant do it.
If we can drive full color touch screens then this should be possible. But we don't really have the ram to use it in some direct wired mode. If your resolution spec is correct (160 tall by 480 wide) we would need 76800 bits to hold all the screen data as monochrome, so 9600 bytes. The 328P only has 2K. We can only buffer a small portion of the screen in direct wire mode. We can play "follow the pen" but that is about it.

Now, I would NOT want to try to drive this straight off the arduino. At least, not for a 'REAL" project. I am considering trying this just to confirm some assumptions. But not sure about the LCD drive voltages, and it would eat up a lot of pins.

Although it would be possible, it would benefit greatly from a controller. I suspect an HD4478 with a few HD44100 column drivers would take care of it. Designing, testing and building that hardware would suck, but then the interface to the Arduino (or anything for that matter) would be simple. Also, we'd no longer need a large frame buffer on the Arduino.

RE PINS:
Looks like yours does not have the touch screen married to the ribbon cable. On mine, the first 4 are touch screen. This is pretty standard fare, and a 4 analog input pins ought to do it. Already libraries exist. It IS an odd size, but that's just twiddling code.

From the screen itself:
first 6 pins are for ROWS.
Pin 7 is NC
Pin 8 to 18 seem to be columns (there are 3 groups. If you rip apart the screen it becomes obvious. I will post photos of the dissection later. 8 bit with 2 'address' lines?)
last 2 (or 3?) are for the backlight. I just confirmed that it requires an EL inverter. Hooked a EL wire supply up to it and it turned green.

My count for the rows might not be entirely correct but it is close. The rows and columns are divided into two boards. A total of 9 wires join the rows board to the 'main' board.

Very nice information gathered on your post i am however using a arduino mega using the 2560 but i understand that it may need some driver chips to actually "use" the screen to its full potential, if i could, i would love to get this running and hook up a few devices with my mega and may even make a small OS, i even have a small keypad sort of thing that i could also wire up to the arduino and use that to navigate the OS but right now im currently busy with work so i might not have time to actually start this project but if i have the time i will definitely get around to it.
Thanks for the information on the pinouts as well that will really help wiring it up to the display drivers you mentioned and actually use the screen.
i also noticed you mentioned the touchscreen, that is what i was usually after until i put a little to much force on the glass and actually cracked the touchscreen completely destroying it(tested it and nothing worked)

i also understand that this is a old post i havent been using my arduinos for a while now and im starting to get back into them and get some small projects going