I have four of these LCDs, removed from dead Dell Poweredge 2560 file servers:
The LCD is unlabeled, except for a number on the top:
The LCD is a character display, 2 lines x 8 characters with a backlight. It is attached to the carrier board by a 12 connector ribbon cable. The back of the board looks like this:
That's the ribbon connector on the left.
Not sure if it's relevant, but the chip on the right is a Xilink CLPD:
I don't know if it's driving or just talking to the LCD.
I'd like to be able to drive this LCD from an Arduino, but am not sure how big a task this is, or where to begin. Any advice about how to identify this part?
The board is a status display and indicator panel for a Dell PowerEdge 2650 server. That may have been an IDE cable, but I don't have the rest of the hardware anymore, just the front panel. I think the board does some powerup diagnostics and can display errors if the machine fails to boot. It also acts as an information display while the machine is running and no monitor is connected.
The board is a status display and indicator panel for a Dell PowerEdge 2650 server. That may have been an IDE cable, but I don't have the rest of the hardware anymore, just the front panel. I think the board does some powerup diagnostics and can display errors if the machine fails to boot. It also acts as an information display while the machine is running and no monitor is connected.
Yeah I looked it up but couldn't find any reference to what connection it used to the server (to maybe give an idea of how to go about using it)
It's not clear from the pics what all the chips are - have you looked up the datasheets for them all?
I've looked up the data sheet for the Xilinx chip, but I couldn't make heads or tails of it. I'm only really interested in the LCD, so I was mostly interested in an assessment on the practically of interfacing it to an arduino. Is this a display with a simple serial interface, or does it require driver hardware? A rule of thumb I've read is that a small interface cable (16 pins or less) usually means a high level interface with an onboard controller.