8:37 pm

eric

In this previous post I disassembled the Coby DP-151SX digital picture frame. This device is very hackable, and includes a lot of goodies such as a Li-Ion battery and battery charger circuit as well as a neat little color LCD display with a white LED backlight. The pinout for the LCD is in the previous post.

The MAXQ2000 microcontroller development board I have uses a 0.1″ spacing header to connect to the I/O pins, so I made a little adapter and wired it up to the LCD connector using wire-wrap wire. It uses 13 I/O lines, but that could be reduced 11 if CS# is wired to ground and RST# tied to a separate reset IC (such as a MAX811). It’s actually a good idea to use CS#, because you can then multiplex the functionality of all the other pins and recover that I/O.

Here is a picture showing the LCD up and running with a simple test pattern:



It’s not 128×128, but actually 132×132 pixels. The color depth is 16-bit using a fairly standard 5-6-5 bit encoding. See the PCF8833 datasheet for more details.

Spark Fun has a similar LCD display which uses the same controller, only it costs $20. Amazon.com sells the Coby-151SX in black for $10. Not a bad deal: for $10 less you get a Li-Ion battery, mini-USB cable, and a driver CD, which you could use as a coaster for your Mountain Dew to help with the LCD programming. Spark Fun has some sample code which you should easily be able to adapt for parallel mode (since the Coby LCD connector brings out the parallel data lines, unlike the Spark Fun LCD).

The source code for my test program will get posted once I clean it up and possibly add functionality (Character fonts? Bit blitters?)