Help identifying a scrapped LCD?

Other Hardware Displays
1

So, I found this 12 pin LCD/driver board in my scrap box recently and I need some help identifying the pinout. I have absolutely no idea what it came from and as far as I can tell it's a 16x2 4-bit parallel LCD, but I can't figure out what half the pins do. I took pictures and tried to outline all the traces etc. Dots in the middle or at the end of a trace respresent a via.







I'm off to bed now so sorry for the lack of information. If I remember anything tomorrow I'll post it.

2

Alright, so I tried comparing the LCD with one of my HD44780 displays and I believe that the pink pin is the contrast pin because my HD44780 has a very similar resistor bank connected to the contrast pin. Now I just need to find the main supply voltage pin and I should at least be able to get something on the display.

3

Ok, I put 5 volts on the pink pin and got this:

I guess it came out of a phone...
Also this probably means that the pink pin is not the actually the contrast pin. Although lowering the voltage does make the display dimmer (until I get to 3.5v), my HD44780 needs between 0-1 volts on the contrast pin. Then again, my HD44780 is white letters on a black display, unlike this LCD.

Now that I think about it, this display probably came from the phone I garbage picked years ago. I threw away the case just a week ago though =(
Maybe I still have the PCB. I'll go look for it.

4

Ok, I found the PCB's for both the wireless handset and the desk phone. Unfortunately, whatever company made this phone didn't feel it was necassary to label their PCB's with useful information such as company name and product name, so I can't even find a datasheet. I assume the handset had the same processor (before I ripped it of and threw it away, derp) as the desk phone but I can't find a datasheet for that either so I can't really follow the traces anywhere. Not sure how images could help at this stage but it wont hurt I guess:

5

Unfortunately, you can be pretty sure that it's a custom LCD. It won't be using any standard controller - I wouldn't use more time investigating if I were you, find a nice interesting LCD in eBay to play with instead...

// Per.