if i were to pull an lcd screen from an old phone, would i be able to program it and display pictures of my choosing?

[kcthomas]

if i were to pull an lcd screen from an old phone, would i be able to program it and display pictures of my choosing?

i would like to use an old display in a nifty little gadget. are there programable chips you can use to drive a screen like this so you can display something of your choosing? can you buy discrete tft screens? the size i am looking for is about 1" circular preferably but square could also do (hence the idea of pulling it out of the front of my old phone)

 

[MrDudeMan]

it depends if you can find the datasheet to see the timing. interfacing to LCDs is dead simple, but knowing how to program them is not. they require hold times and busy states because they run slower than the microcontroller which is sending them data (usually). you can seach on allelectronics.com, electronic goldmine (goldmine-elec.com or something like that), digikey, or a few others. you can buy rectangles (8x2, 16x2, 20x2, 20x4, 40x2, 40x4, etc.) and then some odd shaped ones (128x64 or similar).

do you have any experience with microcontrollers, and if so, which ones? i can help you pretty much from start to finish if you are using a motorola or atmel in assembly or C, but only C with the other brands. do you have a way to program it? you can use the parallel port on your computer if not, but that is definitely the less-elegant solution.

i usually design my own PCB to fit the LCD i want to use, and then program the MCU to drive it. i have no idea what your skills are, but if you want a board i can send you one of my extras. it requires very few components, i.e. atmel mega164p, 2x3 pin header, a few caps, and a diode (+ the atmel programmer). i know that is slightly off-topic, but i thought id mention it in case you were interested.

 

[PottedMeat]

to add to MrDudeMan's post -

There are several types of LCDs you can salvage from old equpment. There are ones with fixed display properties designed to display only a few types of data like phone numbers and icons ( XXX-XXX-XXX or 'AM PM' as an icon ). If that happens to be the data you need then great - but you will also have to drive the liquid crystal with specific AC waveforms to getwhat you want. There are 5x7 pixel blocks arranged in 8x2/20x2/40x2 etc. alphanumeric displays that you can salvage from printers/some phones and equipment. These are by far the easiest to use - they have an integrated controller that allows you to interface with only 8 bidirectional lines and 3 control lines at 3.3 to 5V levels. Also some monochrome graphical lcds ( 128x64 etc ) include a controller where you can program individual pixel control ( with a little more work ). Then there are those larger graphical panels with no controller where you must refresh the screen with correct timing and data to get it to work ( I've never used these before but you can get some data from online sites like Circuit Cellar ). I believe those are the most common types and there are less common hybrids of these.

 

[kcthomas]

the screen i can pull from my phone is 98 x 67 and 4k colors. i guess ill have to open it up to see what type it is and see if i can get a datasheet. do you think i would be able to pull a microcontroller out of the phone and re-program it? i dont have any experience with microcontrollers but i probably have the equipment at work to program.

i am looking in to building a little lcd analog clock. nothing fancy but i just thought it would be cool.

 

[PottedMeat]

That LCD may be made for just that phone and it's possible you will never find the datasheet, and reverse engineering the interface isnt worth your time. I think SparkFun and others have little color LCDs you can easily interface to ( many people would have done it before and all sorts of quirks have been documented ). Digikey has OSRAM OLED displays single color many shade for ~11USD. Don't bother trying to salvage the controller out of the phone though. You can also get devkits for Z80/HCS08/MSP430/etc. microcontrollers from digikey from ~50-100 bucks.