From: pepke@scri1.scri.fsu.edu (Eric Pepke) Subject: Casio LCD TV's Date: 11 Oct 91 18:02:36 GMT Organization: Florida State University, but I don't speak for them The Spine-Chilling Saga of the Casio LCD TV's, Part 1 I bought a couple of Casio LCD TV's, model TV-8500. These are 8 cm by 5.5 cm color jobbies, battery operated. This is appreciably bigger than the Lynx screen, and I had decided, from squinting at various televisions through lenses, that this was about the minimum size that I want to use for homebrew eyephones. These were on sale, so I got them for less than $200 apiece. The color, when driven by a video signal, is somewhat washed out but still pretty good. I think that one of the problems is that the internal lights are too bright. They'd certainly be too bright for the inside of a helmet, so it will be neccessary to change the driver circuitry. I got tired of waiting for enough spare time to rip one apart, so I did it anyway. Inside, it has two basic elements. There's the display module, which contains the display, the fluorescent tubes, and some custom chips. It's sealed in a can. There's also the analog board, which has the buttons and jacks and the audio circuitry. I have only seen one side of the analog board, but it appears to be all discrete. Lots of tiny little surface-mount components. The display module and the analog board are connected with a 24-conductor ribbon connector and six fatter wires for power and the two fluorescent tubes. I am hoping that it will be possible to figure out what's going on in that ribbon connector and get into the circuitry there. I know that there is a PAL as well as an NTSC version. I am hoping that they engineered it so that the analog board does all the PAL/NTSC and RF, and that the display module is responsible for all the actual picture generation. Maybe I'll get lucky and find a chip on the reverse side of the analog board and get enough information to conclude that the lines on the ribbon connector include address lines! More as I find it out. Eric Pepke INTERNET: pepke@gw.scri.fsu.edu Supercomputer Computations Research Institute MFENET: pepke@fsu Florida State University SPAN: scri::pepke Tallahassee, FL 32306-4052 BITNET: pepke@fsu Disclaimer: My employers seldom even LISTEN to my opinions. Meta-disclaimer: Any society that needs disclaimers has too many lawyers.