I found a plug and play poker system for free, and immediately disassembled it. Of course, there were huge epoxy blobs which really irk me, and each of 8 controllers had about a 2x3 inch LCD.
I an trying to reverse engineer these 16 pin lcds for use with Arduino. Can anyone help me? On the controller input there is "SDA", "SCK", "VCC", "GND", and "CE". Would it be better to control through these pins or the lcd directly?
The LCD has no markings whatsoever.
Thanks, Mac
As you can tell by the deluge of answers, the answer is simple. Find the (full) datasheet for this device and you are "home and hosed".
No point being irked by the epoxy blobs, they are every bit as good (or better) than having the same IC in a DIP package. Either you have the datasheet, or you do not. Does the LCD have another chip on it? I suspect from your description that by "LCD" you mean the actual glass display unit itself, in which case it is pretty much a waste of time considering driving it with the necessary voltages even if you knew what they were. The chip in the "blob" is already made to drive them, and that is it.
The designations you describe are the control pins for an "IIC" or "I2C" interface. The Arduino is designed to drive such an interface with the "Wire" library. All you need is the datasheet of the particular module to know what commands to send.
You could waste a lot of time on this - its likely a custom programmed chip, any
data on it are in Chinese or Japanese and commercial-in-confidence (or simply
lost). Its a cheap toy, basically.
Oh.
Was I too subtle then?
I wouldnt waste time by trying to make it work with arduino, there are shields with LCD displays and buttons freely available and their use is well documented,
Unless you want to use the cheapo poker one just for the sake of it of course,
I agree about not spending time on this, or at least not much.
And I've got four large screen color TFT touchscreen cell phones I'd love to reverse engineer... but when I think about all the time I'll spend, $30 for a touchscreen 3.2 inch 320x240 screen doesn't seem so bad.
