A long time ago, when I discovered the 4D Systems line of OLED serial-controlled displays I was very impressed – an awesome screen with an easy to understand interface was just what I wanted to play with.
Now that I’ve had one for a while – the uOLED-160-GMD1 – I find that I’m stuck in a swamp of indecision about how to try and display things on the screen. Options and choices turned out to be a real problem for me. I will still use it for something and the fact that I’ve switched to Arduino vs. just plain C code on an ATmega may make things more straightforward.
Those troubles combined with working out how I was going to fit all the parts of the RetroTAC inside the StarTAC casing lead me to crack open one of my 7797 models (LCD dot matrix screen vs. the 3000 models’ multiple 7-segment LED) to feast on the goo inside see what treasures lay within.
What I discovered was that the keypad, LCD and LCD controller are all on one board. It looks as if I could basically just ‘replace’ the mainboard and keep the existing keypad board if I can work out how to interface to the LCD’s controller IC.
Handily, the IC is labelled clearly with its model number: SED1530DAA.
Some googling reveals several versions of the datasheet for the SED1530, some more useful than others. Basically it is a “single-chip LCD driver for dot-matrix LCDs” by Epson, supporting parallel or serial (seems to be an input-only SPI bus) communication.
I’m in for a bit of work to interface to it, both physicaly and electronically, but if I succeed I’ll be able to write a driver to use the original screen hardware in my RetroTAC!
Any tips, theories, ideas or comments are welcome.
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