[Sprite_tm] Gives Near Death VFD a Better Second Life

[Sprite_tm] picked up some used VFD displays for cheap, and wanted to make his own custom temperature and air-quality display. He did that, of course, but turned it into a colossal experiment in re-design to boot. What started out as a $6 used VFD becomes priceless with the addition of hours of high-powered hacking mojo.

You see, the phosphor screen had burnt-in spots where the old display was left static for too long. A normal person would either live with it or buy new displays. [Sprite_tm] ripped off the old display driver and drives the row and column shift registers using the DMA module on a Raspberry Pi2, coding up his own fast PWM/BCM hybrid scheme that can do greyscale.

He mapped out the individual pixels using a camera and post processing in The Gimp to establish the degradation of burnt-in pixels. He then re-wrote a previous custom driver project to compensate for the pixels’ inherent brightness in firmware. After all that work, he wrapped the whole thing up in a nice wooden frame.

There’s a lot to read, so just go hit up his website. High points include the shift-register-based driver transplant, the bit-angle modulation that was needed to get the necessary bit-depth for the grayscale, and the PHP script that does the photograph-based brightness correction.

Picking a favorite [Sprite_tm] hack is like picking a favorite ice-cream flavor: they’re all good. But his investigation into hard-drive controller chips still makes our head spin just a little bit. If you missed his talks about the Tamagotchi Singularity from the Hackaday SuperCon make sure you drop what you’re doing and watch it now.

Filed under: hardware