Any ideas as to what this is?!

Hi

I've just purchased a random bag of displays from Maplin, for a fiver. It had 10 displays in, 9 little ones, and a big one. I figured the big one looked interesting and that I would be able to find out about it on t'internet. But no.

It is a "YB BTG-16080A-PCB-A". It has a chip on it, a Toshiba T6963CFG which a a dot-matrix controller. It has 8 push button switches below the display.

It looks like this:

Have I bought something interesting that someone knows about... or a piece of junk !?

Paul

I would guess that it is a piece of junk.

The first step is to read the legends on the 9x2 male header.
Then connect the pins to an Arduino running a T6963C library.

It looks as if the 8 pads are for membrane buttons. Ignore them for the moment.

Let us know how you get on.

David.

It will be surplus production for some random commercial device, no docs, may or may not work,
if Google can't help you're left with a big reverse-engineering challenge(!)

Given the number of pins on the chips its not just a display but the complete controller for the device,
ie a high spec microcontroller + RAM + ROM.

david_prentice:
I would guess that it is a piece of junk.

The first step is to read the legends on the 9x2 male header.
Then connect the pins to an Arduino running a T6963C library.

It looks as if the 8 pads are for membrane buttons. Ignore them for the moment.

Let us know how you get on.

David.

The 9x2 header goes:

EL- C/D DB6 DB4 DB2 DB0 RD CE VCC
EL+ DB7 DB5 DB3DB1 RST WR RE GND

those DBs are connected to the 8 membrane buttons

I've tried sticking 5v accross VCC-GND, but nothing happens except the power supply light goes out!

Maybe it's broken, maybe it's not worth the effort, I don't know...

Thanks for your input guys, anyway

As I suggested earlier, compare with a regular T6963C display. Most of the pin names match.

EL-, EL+ are probably the backlight. Connect to 5V via a 47R series resistor.
RE might be Font Select.

Connect VCC, GND via 100R and measure the current. Change to 0R if it seems safe to do so.

I would guess that the LCD voltages are generated / adjusted on the pcb. Is there a preset potentiometer?

EL-, EL+ might be LCD voltages and not the backlight. Measure current.

Post the part numbers on the "big" i.c.s

David.

All you need to do is find the datasheet online and work with the pinout...
you can find tons of tutorials that explains what is every pin in LCD displays, just not for
this spacific one! I had the same problem as you - I bought some electronic garbage online and
didnt found any tutorial for that xD
and as people said earlier, you can ignore the buttons for now, when you will find the datasheet you will see
which pins are for the buttons so dont connect these pins if you dont need the buttons right now.

The EL-pins is probably for an Electroluminescent backlight panel. That requires about 100V at 100Hz to light up.

It seems the display has built-in contrast circuitry (for the negative 30V-ish voltage) - It might require a potentiometer on one of the pins to GND to set the voltage (I'm thinking the RE-pin). Trace all pins to the T6963C-controller, those that does not go to the main controller are of interest regarding the contrast.

// Per.

Please do NOT connect 100V anywhere.

Green displays are readable without any backlight.
As suggested earlier, please post the part numbers printed on the chips.
This would give a pretty good idea what sort of display, power supply, ... you have got.

David.

david_prentice:
Please do NOT connect 100V anywhere.

Of course OP should not connect 100VAC anywhere without checking that the backlight is indeed EL. The small slim contacts at the right of the panel suggest that it is.

But yes, it is perfectly readable without the backlight working. EL-backlight is pretty poor anyway.

// Per.

Hi

so sorry to have not replied before, holiday and life in general getting in the way! Just in ce you were worried, no I didn't kill myself applying 100v to the thing.

I tried applying 5v across VCC and GND but with a 47R resistor this time and the display came to life, displaying a random load of undecipherable pulsing stuff.

All the pixels activate, some pulsing, assume the contrast is up full and then gibberish on top.

It could be interesting...

But as you asked, the chips are :

Toshiba T6963CFG - 1 of
Samsung C720 S682086X01-T08 - 3 of
Lyontek LY62256SL - 1 of

Should be 160x80 LCD graphic panel http://www.ampire.com.tw/en/p1-product-detail.asp
T6963 controller is fairly common but you might need to tweak an existing library to support it driving 160x80

Sparkfun has some good documentation on the T6963 controller.. https://www.sparkfun.com/datasheets/LCD/Monochrome/T6963C-AppNote.pdf

If you download the Adafruit graphics library for supporting the T6963 controller you will find the source file U8x8_d_t6963.c file. Inside are display info and initialization sequences defined for currently supported resolutions of 240x128, 240x64, 256x64, and 128x64. The initialize sequences look the same for all current resolutions. The only difference appears to be the u8x8_display_info_t data. And the only difference in these is the last two lines where the resolution is specified in pixel_width and pixel_height. I would just try adding a set of new definitions in the C file with the 160x80 resolution. Might need to add the new template to the H file as well. (Or just modify one of the existing to describe the new 160x80 resolution)

/* chip_enable_level = / 0,
/
chip_disable_level = */ 1,

/* post_chip_enable_wait_ns = / 110, / T6963 Datasheet p30 /
/
pre_chip_disable_wait_ns = / 100, / T6963 Datasheet p30 /
/
reset_pulse_width_ms = / 1,
/
post_reset_wait_ms = / 6,
/
sda_setup_time_ns = / 20,
/
sck_pulse_width_ns = / 140,
/
sck_clock_hz = / 1000000UL, / since Arduino 1.6.0, the SPI bus speed in Hz. Should be 1000000000/sck_pulse_width_ns /
/
spi_mode = / 0,
/
i2c_bus_clock_100kHz = / 4,
/
data_setup_time_ns = / 80,
/
write_pulse_width_ns = / 80,
/
tile_width = / 30,
/
tile_hight = / 8,
/
default_x_offset = / 0,
/
flipmode_x_offset = / 0,
/
pixel_width = / 240,
/
pixel_height = */ 64

Hope this helps... Maybe you already got this far. Good luck!

Apologies again for the long delay replying.

And thank you very much for the extensive answers you've provided, I really appreciate it.

I've had a look at what you said, downloaded the libraries and read the pdf.

and to be honest I've decided I'm just too inexperienced to deal with this thing right now

I'm slowly working myself up with all this Arduino based malarkey, and this is just too much for me at this stage!

Maybe I'll return to this one day... I hope so - thanks again for all your help.