Mystery LCD

Are you sure it's not a 14 conductor ribbon? If so, it's probably the generic type of lcd. See if it has a Hitachi HD44780 chip on it. There is plenty of information about this controller on the web.

If that didn't help, what else can you tell us about the display? Is it a character display or a bitmap? Can you see how many lines/characters/etc it has? Was it pulled from something? If so, what was it?

I counted twice ... definitely 15 conductors. The ribbon is actually wide enough for 16, but one trace is omitted. I couldn't find any controller chips on the LCD itself, but I didn't want to destroy it prying the back off.

The display is a bitmap type; I didn't count the pixels but they look to be about 1mm x 1mm (these are a bit rough; I just put a ruler next to it and mm match up better than fractions of an inch, but it's not a very precise ruler) so it would be roughly 140x30 pixels. I've seen it display graphics, large characters, small characters, and special characters (signal strength bars). It also displays inverted characters, i.e. dark characters on a lit up background. I pulled it from a JVC Sirius satellite radio receiver.

Aha, if it's not a character-based LCD then it does not fall within my sphere of expertise (the generic kind that all work the same way. :) However, there are several popular graphic controllers out there as well. If you could determine which of the pins is power and ground, that will help you spot the data sheet that looks most like yours (although sometimes the pins are moved around just for the heck of it.)

After some closer inspection, with actual light this time, I see that it's actually 16 conductors, but two of them are ground and one is almost definitely +V of some sort (but I couldn't trace out where it goes).

I also peeled back some more taped stuff and see that at least the ribbon cable is made by "Truly," and there were some part numbers there that appeared to be the same style as the ones printed on the back of the LCD. So some progress there, I guess. I also traced those signal lines back to the Atmel chip so I've got an idea of what it's getting. So ... going to keep at this. There's bound to be some documentation somewhere, I've just got to track it down.

Thanks

could not find anything on a TG20xx. but if it has 16 pins, last 2 should be backlight (5V). that leaves you 14 pins in a normal lcd configuration as someone mentioned. rw