I am working on a prop of the Mission Impossible Fallout Nuclear weapon.
Built the remote based on an ESP32.... all working fine, and used a cheapy (but actually OK) ILI9341 based 2.4" display.
This was an 18pin ribbon cable affair and a NIGHTMARE to find a correct pitch connector for.
In fact, I ended up soldering to the ribbon cable as I just could not find the correct pitch.
I now need a similar display for the main weapon... which in the movie is CGI overlaid on a blank box. Hence, no such sized screen (that I can find).
Ideally... it need to be something like 4.8" x 2.2" (120mm x 55mm), but that is an impossible size.
Any ideas for a screen? TFT with no touch required. Biggest AliExpress throws up is 3.2" (so far), but that is far short.
I would search for Maithoga on AliExpress. They have many TFT panels and displays.
Searching for Surenoo looked less promising.
And you can find FPC breakout boards on AliExpress, too. I never tried to solder flexible FPC connectors directly.
-jz-
Last resort solder to the FPC cable, but is came out surprising well!
The pitch of the 18 way FPC cable was a really odd size and nobody had one.
Plus, the 'twist' to get the FPC cable around to the front PCB was too much, so a longer, more flexible cable actually worked fine.
The screen PCB connector had to be a 5x2 1.27mm header anyway due to space (you don't actually need all 18 individual cores of the FPC).
You said you wanted 4.8" and I linked to a 5" one. There are larger ones available. I also have a 7"
Yes, I agree that they are very limited in I/O but they do have serial, I2C and SPI for expansion.
Trouble is, they don't fit within the scale of the enclosure. These prop folk like their props to be film accurate!
5" and 7" screens are far too high. Like I said, the screen actually doesn't exist. Hence... CGI cheating.
I played around with those ESP32 screens and wrote them off as the only real way of using them is to add everything by I2C. The are very limited on their pinouts.
They have multiple sockets called temp sensor, IO etc... but it turns out they are all just repeated I2C pins .
I would have to have another ESP32 as the main controller, talking to the ESP32 based screen which seems overkill. Because the ESP32 built into that screen would not be available for me to interface into the rest of the project.
I have found some 3.5" wide TFT screens on AlieExpress. I'll try a couple of those, because they are actually quite long and narrow.
Don't have the dimensions to hand.... it's something like 100mm wide by 70mm high (pic in first post). Different screen shot show a slightly different case (some is CGI).
The screen is smaller than that, and it has a bezel inside the front which helps.
I have found some 3.5mm TFT screens.... I think I can work with those. There are some 4" screens as well, but the AliExpress info on those is a bit lacking.
That's a length vs width ratio of about 1.4:1 where the photo you show has a ratio of 1.9:1. It seems to me you would need to know the dimensions of your enclosure before you could attempt to find a display that fits.
Would it be possible to use three smaller displays, side by side horizontally, behind a dark bezel to hide the joints? Put the hours and "DEVICE" on the left display, minutes with colons and "ARMED" in the middle, and seconds with the bar graph on the right.
That isn't how prop building works (it's my job).... its NEVER an exacting science.
What you see in the movies is usually not possible.
In this day and age, they don't really bother making practical effects on screens/timers etc.
Its far easier to just CGI the graphics on afterwards, which usually means odd/impossible sizes.
This is the remote I have already made for example..
The actual film 'dummy' prop for the helicopter fight scene, sold at the prop store this year.
This was probably the 'Hero' prop, but the screen etc still would have been added by CGI. Just the leds may have worked and the toggle cover would have been red.
I do know the size of the enclosure (I did say I can't remember)... But even that is a best guess estimate. There is no way of knowing what the actual prop dimension are exactly.
My 'scaled guess' is actually 185 x 85mm (so I was way out when I guessed above!). But I think that may be slightly too big.
But again... several different shots in the movie show different enclosures, different front panels and even different graphics. You have to pick a middle point and run with it.
