Category Archives: lcd

Digital Picture Frame Turned Vectrex Overlay

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For Hackaday readers which might not be so well versed in the world of home video gaming before the 1983 crash, the Vectrex was an interesting attempt at bringing vector graphics into player’s living rooms. Priced around $500 in today’s dollars, the machine was unique in that it included its own black and white CRT display rather than requiring the owner to plug it into their television. To spice things up a little bit, games would include a thin plastic overlay you could put over the screen to give the game faux colors. What can we say? It was the …read more

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Spooky Animated Eyes for Your Frightening Needs

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Unless you have an incredibly well-stocked parts bin, it’s probably too late to build these spooky animated eyes to scare off the neighborhood kiddies this year. But next year…

It’s pretty clear that Halloween decorating has gone over the top recently. It may not be as extreme as some Christmas displays, but plenty of folks like to up the scare-factor, and [wermy] seems to number himself among those with the spirit of the season. Like Christmas lights, these eyes are deployed as a string, but rather than just blink lights, they blink creepy eyes from various kinds of creatures. The …read more

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Trashed TV Gets RGB LED Backlight

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It might not be obvious unless you’ve taken one apart, but most of the TVs and monitors listed as “LED” are simply LCD panels that use a bank of LEDs to illuminate them from behind. Similarly, what are generally referred to as “LCDs” are LCD panels that use fluorescent tubes for illumination. To get a true LED display with no separate backlight, you need OLED. Confused? Welcome to the world of consumer technology.

With those distinctions in mind, the hack that [Zenodilodon] recently performed on a broken “LED TV” is really rather brilliant. By removing the dead white LED backlights …read more

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Custom LCD Module is Unexpectedly Cheap and Easy

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Looking to take your project to the next level in terms of functionality and appearance? A custom LCD display might be the thing that gets you there, at least compared to the dot-matrix or seven-segment displays that anyone and their uncle can buy from the usual sources for pennies. But how does one create such a thing, and what are the costs involved? As is so often the case these days, it’s simpler and cheaper than you think, and [Dave Jones] has a great primer on designing and specifying custom LCDs.

The video below is part of an ongoing series; …read more

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Recycle LCDs into LEDs

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We always find it funny when we see ads for modern LED TVs. These TVs don’t use LEDs to show the picture. They are nothing more than LCD screens with LED backlighting instead of cold cathode fluorescent lamps. [Akshaylals] had a few LCD laptop and phone panels that were defunct and decided to recycle them to get to the LEDs within.

Most panels are lit from one or two edges with a bar of LEDs. You only have to peel off some tape and plastic. If you wonder what all those plastic sheets do, see the [Engineer Guy’s] video, below. …read more

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Hacked LCD Shutter Glasses See The Light

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It’s always a little sad to see a big consumer technology fail. But of course, the upside for us hacker types is that the resulting fire sale is often an excellent source for hardware that might otherwise be difficult to come by. The most recent arrival to the Island of Unwanted Consumer Tech is 3D TV. There was a brief period of time when the TV manufacturers had nearly convinced people that sitting in their living room wearing big dorky electronic glasses was a workable solution, but in the end we know how it really turned out.

Those same dorky …read more

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Super Chromatic Peril Sensitive Sunglasses

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The Joo Janta 200 super-chromatic peril-sensitive sunglasses were developed to help people develop a relaxed attitude to danger. By following the principle of, ‘what you don’t know can’t hurt you,’ these glasses turn completely opaque at the first sign of danger. In turn, this prevents you from seeing anything that might alarm you.

Here we see the beginnings of the Joo Janta hardware empire. For his Hackaday Prize entry, [matt] has created Nope Glasses. Is that meeting running long? Is your parole officer in your face again? Just Nope right out of that with a wave of the hand.

The …read more

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Magic Mirror Tirelessly Indulges Children’s Curiousity

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[pepelepoisson]’s Miroir Magique (“Magic Mirror”) is an interesting take on the smart mirror concept; it’s intended to be a playful, interactive learning tool for kids who are at an age where language and interactivity are deeply interesting to them, but whose ceaseless demands for examples of spelling and writing can be equally exhausting. Inspiration came from his own five-year-old, who can neither read nor write but nevertheless has a bottomless fascination with the writing and spelling of words, phrases, and numbers.

The magic is all in the simple interface. Magic Mirror waits for activation (a simple pass of the hand …read more

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Simple Home-built Projection Clock Projects Time

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There are plenty of cheap projection clocks available, but as [Thomas Pototschnig] points out in this project, where’s the fun in just buying something? He set out to build a cheap projection clock using a small LCD screen, a cheap LED backlight, and a cheap lens. Cheap is the order of the day here, and [Thomas] succeeded admirably, creating a design that can be made with a couple of cheap PCBs, a 3D printer and the other parts mentioned above. He does a nice job of laying out his thinking in this design, showing how he calculated the projection path …read more

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