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 !?
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.
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.
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_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.
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
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)