Hack!

The other day I stumbled across an old Nokia mobile phone sitting helplessly in the drawer.  It’s not really that old, but already it’s pretty useless in terms of what we expect from a mobile phone in this day and age.  What should I do with it? Throw it away?

No! What self-respecting electronics nerd would throw away a piece of kit with all those useful bits and pieces in it? Surely we can make use of some of those parts? What can we do with that GLCD, for example?

I took the phone to bits and robbed the GLCD from it to see what I could come up with.

Find the info!

First of all, I need to find a pin-out for that LCD.  I found this really useful website that details the pinouts for quite a number of Nokia LCDs.  The pinout I was interested in was this one:

Next I needed to find some information about the controller chip on the LCD.  I found from the website that the LCD uses a SED1565 controller so I downloaded a datasheet from the controller from here.

Write some code!

I connected up the LCD using the wiring diagram above and I strapped the SPI bus of the connector to the SPI bus of a PIC micro.  Now it’s time to write some code! If anyone can show me a decent code snippets plugin for wordpress that would be great. All the methods I’ve tried suck eggs. Here’s a link to the sourcecode instead. Open it in Notepad++.

Test it!

After much testing and hackery, I managed to communicate with the GLCD.  Here are the results!

For copy of the c code, see my repository on github: https://github.com/bh4017/nokia7110-glcd/