Morning all,
I'm about to embark on a basic thermostat design from Instructables which will be my first Arduino project using a screen. The authour of the instructable uses the TV out library as his screen has video in.
I have one Uno R3, and a couple of Nano's I could use for this (all clones).
My aim for my display is a simple (one colour or B&W) diplay with touch menus).
I have a salvaged TFT LCD screen from an old TomTom (which will be donating its Sirfstar III GPS chip to another project).
The diplay is a Samsung LTE430WQ-F0B-0BS. It has a 50pin ribbon connector which i can solder to a breakout if I need to. The good things about this screen are:
(1) that it has a built in digitser which outputs the x and y coords from the resistive touch layer;
(2) that it is free - I prefer to learn to use salvaged components rather than buy something easy.
My first issue is that I can't find a datasheet for the F0B version with 50 pins - I have located the F0A and F0C datasheets online which have 40 and 45 pin connectors. None of these match up with my 50pin (there being unused tracks that don't corellate).
My second issue is that I (having googled, including a site: search of this forum) am unsure of how to drive my display - I assume I will need to build a driver circuit using a TFT driver IC of some sort?
With all that in mind I have the following questions:
(A) - is there a way (in absence of a datasheet) check which pins do what using a multimeter, or interrogate them / safely use trial and error via an arduino and breadboard?
(B) - How are these displays driven? Direct from the arduino? or by anoher IC ? -There is a small collection of SMIC's which look like resistors at the top of the ribbon cable - could these be the driver circuit?
Kind regards,
Steve