Drive Old-School Copier Display with 8-Bit AVR MCU

from hackster.io

We’ve all been there. Your office is throwing out a variety of old equipment, and while it’s either outdated or broken, you can’t help but think about the cornucopia of motors, buttons, displays, and other components just waiting for you to hack.

After taking this e-junk home, however, all too often you realize that your skills, enthusiasm, or time constraints for such an upcycling project just aren’t good enough to do what you’d planned.

If one of the piles of e-waste in your garage includes a controllerless graphics LDC (CLGLCD) module commonly found on old copiers or tape libraries, this write-up by Ivan Kostoski can help you figure out how to get things working. Code for the hack is available on GitHub.

He notes that graphics generation for CLGLCD displays is actually fairly simple in concept, and he was able to successfully display an image stored in flash.

Although, changing graphics around is still a challenge with Arduino boards based on 8-bit AVR chips, as they don’t have enough SRAM to hold a full frame of graphics data.

The alternative explored here is using a font generator to generate useful graphics, filling the screen in all of its 320x240 resolution glory.

This software has been tested on Uno, Leonardo, and Pro Micro boards, so if you’ve got a few of these displays that have been searching for a driver, here’s your excuse to pull them out of the junk bin!

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