First of, first post, hi to all. I've joined this site because I couldn't find any active forums dedicated to this sort of thing, and I've seen there are a couple of really good guides on PCBs on bit tech Anyway, I'm in the process of building a PC to put into a car, and I saw an example where someone replaced the main gauges (speedo, rev counter etc) with 2 small LCD screens, and made a visual basic program to sit on them. So, having decided that I want this, I set off looking for a couple of LCD screens. Unfortunately, I couldn't find anything smaller than 7"'s, which is to big for my instrument cluster. Then I had an idea. I dug out my old GPS, and opened her up and extracted the screen, which after some research, is a 4.6 inch with a 40 pin PCF connector. So I've been trying to research/figure out how I would go about getting this connected to a PC. As far as I can make out, I would use a circuit board, laid out as: LCD -> 40 pin ZIF socket -> PCB -> VGA/HDMI adaptor -> PC with another connector for power on the PCB feeding the LD (Assuming the VGA can't do it) So my question is, is this correct? If so, would I need any kind of microprocessor, or could I basically connect the ZIF to the VGA socket? This is all a bit new to me, so I probably haven't explained this all that well, if you have any questions, please let me know. Cheers, Linky
youd need the controller for the screen and maybe another controller to convert the vga signal to something the lcd controller could use, no one ever made a working one, you better go with a small usb screen or smth like that. for the gauge stuff you'd need to access your CAN interface and read out the desired data, this however is pretty easy if your car has OBD, you can buy cheap OBD USB adaptors from ebay (around 20$) and hook them up to a laptop, then write a vbasic program that uses the data from the usb adaptor and displays it in some fancy way, has been done before, been proven that it works, ill do this on an old audi a8 w12 for school somewhen next months
