Category Archives: display

Measure Your YouTube Importance

Posted on July 11, 2019 by Fernando Gomes

How do you hack your motivation? Do you put red marker Xs on a paper calendar every day you exercise? Do you use an egg timer to sprint through dozens of emails? Do you lock all the doors and shut off your data to write some bulletproof code? If you …read more

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Posted in 7-segment display, api, channel, display, multiple 7-segment display, notifier, subscribers, video hacks, youtube | Leave a comment

Apple Just Killed The VESA Mount And We Couldn’t Be Happier

Posted on June 5, 2019 by Fernando Gomes

After the immense failure of the 2013-era Apple Pro trash can Mac, Apple has been hard at work at the next generation of workstation desktops. This week, the new Mac Pro has been announced, and the specs are amazing: We finally can buy a professional, desktop Mac with half the …read more

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Posted in apple, display, Mac Hacks, mac pro, vesa, vesa mount | Leave a comment

Make Your Own Old School LED Displays

Posted on May 31, 2019 by Fernando Gomes

We live in an era in which all manner of displays are cheap and readily available. A few dollars spent online can net you a two-line alphanumeric LCD, a graphical OLED screen, or all manner of other options. Years ago however, people made do with little monolithic LED devices. [sjm4306] …read more

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Posted in 7 segment, display, led, LED display, led hacks | Leave a comment

Putting an Out of Work iPod Display to Good Use

Posted on February 12, 2019 by Fernando Gomes

[Mike Harrison] produces so much quality content that sometimes excellent material slips through the editorial cracks. This time we noticed that one such lost gem was [Mike]’s reverse engineering of the 6th generation iPod Nano display from 2013, as caught when the also prolific [Greg Davill] used one on a recent board. Despite the march of progress in mobile device displays, small screens which are easy to connect to hobbyist style devices are still typically fairly low quality. It’s easy to find fancier displays as salvage but interfacing with them electrically can be brutal, never mind the reverse engineering required …read more

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Posted in display, dsi, fpga, hardware, ipod, ipod hacks, ipod nano, mipi, reverse engineering | Leave a comment

Modernizing a Soviet-era LED Matrix

Posted on February 5, 2019 by Fernando Gomes

Used in everything from calculators to military hardware, the 3LS363A is an interesting piece of vintage hardware. With a resolution of 5 x 7 (plus a decimal point), the Soviet-made displays contain no electronics and are simply an array of 36 green LEDs. It’s not hard to drive one of them in a pinch, but [Dmitry Grinberg] thought this classic device deserved a bit better than the minimum.

He’s developed a small board that sits behind the 3LS363A and allows you to control it over I2C for a much more modern experience when working with these vintage displays. Powered by …read more

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Posted in 3LS363A, ATtiny Hacks, ATtiny406, display, i2c, led, led hacks, parts, soviet | Leave a comment

Sharpest Color CRT Display is Monochrome Plus a Trick

Posted on January 17, 2019 by Fernando Gomes

I recently came across the most peculiar way to make a color CRT monitor. More than a few oscilloscopes have found their way on to my bench over the years, but I was particularly struck with a find from eBay. A quick look at the display reveals something a little alien. The sharpness is fantastic: each pixel is a perfect, uniform-colored little dot, a feat unequaled even by today’s best LCDs. The designers seem to have chosen a somewhat odd set of pastels for the UI though, and if you move your head just right, you can catch flashes of …read more

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Posted in crt, display, Engineering, Featured, NuColor, oscilloscope, tool hacks | Leave a comment

A Daylight-Readable Bar Graph Display in the 70s Wasn’t Cheap

Posted on November 12, 2018 by Fernando Gomes

LEDs weren’t always an easy solution to displays and indicators. The fine folks at [Industrial Alchemy] shared pictures of a device that shows what kind of effort and cost went into making a high brightness bar graph display in the 70s, back when LEDs were both expensive and not particularly bright. There are no strange materials or methods involved in making the display daylight-readable, but it’s a peek at how solving problems we take for granted today sometimes took a lot of expense and effort.

The display is a row of 28 small incandescent bulbs, mounted in a PCB and …read more

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Posted in 70s, bar graph, comparator, daylight readable, display, hardware, incandescent, led, machined aluminum, minitron, retro, retrocomputing, wamco | Leave a comment

Faded Beauty DMM Gets An OLED Makeover

Posted on August 29, 2018 by Fernando Gomes

When a fine piece of lab instrumentation crosses your bench, you’ve got to do your best to put it to work. But even in the highest quality devices no component lasts forever, especially vacuum tubes. For some vintage instruments with vacuum fluorescent displays, that means putting up with less-than-perfect digits in order to get that sweet, sweet precision. Or not – you can always reverse engineer the thing and add a spanking new OLED display.

The Hewlett-Packard 34401A digital multimeter that fell into [qu1ck]’s lap was a beauty, but it had clearly seen better days. The display was full of …read more

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Posted in digital multimeter, display, dmm, H-P, hewlett packard, oled, segment, spi, tool hacks, vfd | Leave a comment