hacking lcd displays factory

Judging by my experiences with car dealerships (and being an ASE Master Auto Tech for almost 10 years myself) I would say that the dealership wouldn’t notice. They avoid getting under the dash at all costs, and with satellite radio add-ons and such, it’s pretty common to have people come in to the dealership with aftermarket electronics added under the dash. Unless they had to service/replace the LCD module itself, they would never know.

I can’t support anyone on this. Looking in to it and any way you look at it, it’s software piracy, piracy of a company’s product that I am very loyal to. There is no way that you can twist this to call it “innocent hacking”, etc. OTC has a lot of money and a lot of lawyers, and seeing that no one but me (in the world, lol) has truly cracked this tool, I am NOT going to make myself a target. Good luck guys.

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.

We’re amazed at how low the barrier to entry into custom electronics has become, and even if you don’t need a custom LCD, at these prices it’s tempting to order one just because you can. Of course, you can also build your own LCD display completely from scratch too.

*The second was also ungooglable, and featured a Mitsubishi (same as the chemical company and car manufacturer) logo. Most of the large number of traces went to the screen"s ribbon cable, though a few went to each of the other chips. I assume this is the screen controller which encodes characters, as the screen is a graphical black LCD in the largest area.

Gadget Factory forum user Alex received a junked old Hitachi screen from his buddy and decided to see if he could get it up and running. The screen is one of those older monochrome, low-resolution (256 x 128) green LCDs and is missing a controller chip. On the back of the display there are eight Hitachi LCD drivers, six column shifters and two row shifters. With no controller chip, the screen could not be driven in a static mode where you could just write image data to the internal memory. Instead, Alex had to figure out a way to use the LCD more like a VGA display where you must constantly send it data to refresh the picture.

I couldn’t find a datasheet for it or pinouts so I went old school and tracked down datasheets for the chips on board and did some reverse engineering of the schematic using a continuity meter. A very good datasheet resource is the “Hitachi LCD Controller Driver LSI Data Book” which is a compendium of a large number of Hitachi LCD controller chips.

We think of our monitors as passive entities. The computer sends them data, and they somehow—magically?—turn it into pixels which make words and pictures.But what if that wasn"t the case? What if hackers could hijack our monitors and turn them against us?As it turns out, that"s possible. A group of researchers has found a way to hack directly into the tiny computer that controls your monitor without getting into your actual computer, and both see the pixels displayed on the monitor—effectively spying on you—and also manipulate the pixels to display different images.Advertisement"We can now hack the monitor and you shouldn"t have blind trust in those pixels coming out of your monitor," Ang Cui, the lead researcher who come up with this ingenious hack, told me earlier this week."You shouldn"t have blind trust in those pixels coming out of your monitor."Cui, the chief scientist at Red Balloon Security and a recent PhD graduate from Columbia University, presented his findings at the Def Con hacking conference in Las Vegas on Friday along with Jatin Kataria and other colleagues.During a demo at the Red Balloon offices in New York City earlier this week, Cui and his colleagues showed me how the hack works. Essentially, if a hacker can get you to visit a malicious website or click on a phishing link, they can then target the monitor"s embedded computer, specifically its firmware. This is the computer that controls the menu to change brightness and other simple settings on the monitor.The hacker can then put an implant there programmed to wait for further instructions. Then, the way the hacker can communicate with the implant is rather shrewd. The implant can be programmed to wait for commands sent over by a blinking pixel, which could be included in any video or a website. Essentially, that pixel is uploading code to the monitor. At that point, the hacker can mess with your monitor.In practice, Cui said this could be used to both spy on you, but also show you stuff that"s actually not there. A scenario where that could dangerous is if hackers mess with the monitor displaying controls for a power plant, perhaps faking an emergency.Advertisement"If you have a monitor, chances are your monitor is affected.""Can I get you to shut down the power plant?" Cui asked rhetorically, with a sly smile. "I can do that."The researchers warn that this is an issue that could potentially affect one billion monitors, given that the most common brands all have processors that are vulnerable."If you have a monitor, chances are your monitor is affected," Cui, who last year showed how to turn printers into bugging devices, told me.The attack, however, has a downside, images are slow to load, so it"s perhaps not the most effective way to manipulate things quickly on the victim"s computer. But that wouldn"t be an issue if hackers are targeting industrial control systems monitors, whose displays are mostly static.For Cui, in any case, the point of the research is to show that this is possible, and that we shouldn"t consider monitors as untouchable, unhackable things."We now live in a world where you can"t trust your monitor," Cui concluded.

The first step in the hack is to select a compatible LCD that’s also conveniently available. For various reasons related to how the flat panel display market works, LCDs are difficult to purchase in their raw form. Fortunately, Mouser Electronics has a fair selection of LCD modules available and in-stock, although the price is no where near wholesale. I found that the Microtips MTF-TV57NP721-AV was a good match; you can buy these directly from Mouser for $150.80 by ordering part number 668-MTF-TV57NP721-AV. This LCD module uses a compatible signal format, has an LED backlight that works with a slightly modified chumby backlight driver, and also features a 4-wire resistive touchscreen, which is exactly the technology used by the stock chumby device. While the datasheet for this display is not available for convenient download, the datasheet itself is not marked proprietary or confidential, so I was able to secure a copy with a phone call to the local Microtips sales representative.

The next step is to build an adapter board between the chumby and the LCD. The adapter board is necessary because the flat-flex connector used by the Microtips LCD has a different size and pinout from the existing chumby LCD connector. The design of the board doesn’t require many components, as it is just rewiring the signals between two connector formats, but getting the design right does require attention to detail. It’s particularly important to make sure you get the location of the connectors right, so as to minimize the stress on the flex cables, and you need to be aware of the pinout inversion that happens between the two sides of a flex cable mating to the same type of connector: pin 1 goes to pin 50, and vice versa. Here is a link to the schematic for the adapter board, and a link to the gerbers.

Since you won’t need the old LCD anymore, loosen the two long Philips screws on the wifi riser assembly and liberate the core from the LCD/bezel assembly by detaching the two flat flex cables that connect to the core board. Save the wifi riser assembly, screws, standoffs and cables. Also leave all the thermal pads in place; they will hold on their own if you do not peel them off of the circuit boards.

You will need to do some minor rework to the core circuit board of the chumby in order to beef up the backlight driver to work with the more power-hungry backlight of the larger LCD. The original chumby backlight is a 10.2 volt, 40 mA 3-LED backlight. The backlight inside the Microtips LCD is also a 10.2 volt backlight, but it requires 200 mA. Fortunately, the boost converter used to drive the chumby’s backlight has a current switch capable of handling that magnitude of current—the TPS65101 has a 2.3A switch in it. However, some of the external circuitry has to be upgraded. In particular, the catch diode D502 has a forward current rating of 0.5A. While the LCD only draws 200 mA, it is a boost converter so the amount of current going through the catch diode is going to be a bit bigger than the ratio of the output voltage to the input voltage times the average current. Therefore, D502 has to get an upgrade to a footprint-compatible but higher current version, such as the 1A-rated MBRX130TP by Micro Commercial, or the 1.5A-rated RB070M-30TR by Rohm. Finally, in order to actually increase the amount of current pumped into the LCD, the current sense resistor in the feedback network of the boost regulator has to be modified. R524 programs the backlight current in the “on” state of the backlight, though the following relationship: I = 1.146V / R524. Its stock value of 57.6 ohms yields a current near 20 mA; replacing this with a 5.6 ohm resistor will yield a current just over 200 mA.

Now that you’ve got all the bits and pieces, it’s time to put it all together. It’s good practice to mount the pieces so that they aren’t “floating”; the flat flex cables are fragile, and they will easily strain and break if you move the unit around too much. If you have access to a laser cutter, you can build the LCD mount using the designs presented below.

Next, cut a second protective bezel using 1/16” clear acrylic using the reverse bezel pattern. This pattern also has alignment markers on it, which are important for making sure the LCD’s active area is centered in the opening of the bezel. There is no need to treat the reverse bezel with paint because it is simply a protective layer to protect the painted front bezel from chipping and scratching.

A set of gaskets are applied to the outside of the LCD along the silvery circuitry area of the touchscreen panel in order to improve the touchscreen’s robustness against heat warpage of the acrylic that can cause the bezel to inadvertently touch down onto the screen. The gasket material in this case is Poron, but you may also use a couple layers of thin-cut pieces of masking tape to create a small offset between the bezel edge and the display.

Before screwing the backplate in place, attach the 33-pin flat flex cable (that you previously made by cutting down the 36-pin cable), and connect the other side to the adapter board; at this time, also connect the 4-pin touchpanel cable and the 50-pin cable for the LCD signals to the motherboard. Then, fold the adapter board assembly over and screw it in place using 4x M2x6mm socket cap screws.

You’re almost done! Flip the LCD assembly into the bezel, using the alignment pattern on the bezel as a guide, and glue the four LCD mounting corners in place, paying attention to ensure that the holes on the mounting corners line up with the holes on the back plate (you can accidentally put a mounting corner on upside down and have the holes end up on the wrong edge of the LCD). Standard super glue works well for this application. Allow the glue to dry for at least a half hour before proceeding.

The kernel contains the code that initializes the video frame buffer’s size, so the timing needs to be programmed into these registers by modifying the kernel source. Here is a patchfile that you can apply to the 1.5.0 kernel (build 565) that performs the appropriate initializations. The patch modifies one of the clock registers inside the MX21 to increase the frequency of the clock feeding the LCD controller, and it also modifies the LCD controller registers itself. It also patches code that handles copying the initial logo screen from a staging area in RAM to its final location. It’s more involved to get the bootloader to behave properly and show a more elegant startup screen; here is a link to the modified bootloader source. This code replicates the QVGA bitmaps stored in the bootloader four times over inside the VGA frame buffer for the chumby, and it handles some other corner cases during the hand-off between the bootloader and the kernel at higher resolutions as well.

Finally, reboot while holding down the touchscreen so that you enter the “Special Options” mode. When the selection screen comes up, you should be able to log in via the serial console and execute the command “update.sh USB”, which will overwrite the bootloader and the primary kernel with the code patches mentioned above. For safety reasons, the backup partitions’ kernel is not modified by the dongle, so you always have a safe partition to return to for re-flashing a broken chumby. The graphics on the screen will look funny in this mode, but it’s not harmful for the LCD.

A state report on Foxconn’s Wisconsin factory depicts a project gone far off course. The report, issued this month by Wisconsin’s Division of Executive Budget and Finance and obtained through a records request, confirms that the company has not built the enormous Gen 10.5 LCD factory specified in its contract. It also says that the building the company claims is a smaller Gen 6 LCD factory shows no signs of manufacturing LCDs in the foreseeable future and “may be better suited for demonstration purposes.”

The report notes that Foxconn received a permit to use its so-called “Fab” for storage, which The Verge first reported this week. Furthermore, according to an industry expert consulted by the state, Foxconn has not ordered the equipment that would be needed to make LCDs. If the building were to be used as an LCD manufacturing facility, the expert notes it would be the smallest Gen 6 in the world and “would appear to be more of a showcase than a business viable for the long term.”

If any LCD-related manufacturing were to take place in the building, the analysis says, it would likely only be the final assembly of components produced elsewhere and imported to Wisconsin. Such a project would have a vastly smaller impact on local supply chains and employ nowhere near the 13,000 workers anticipated in Foxconn’s contract with the state.

Regarding the company’s failure to build LCDs and two years spent veering from idea to idea (co-working, fish farming, building giant glass spheres), the company said “Foxconn’s progress in Wisconsin has been achieved despite many growing pains that includes the need to explore new business opportunities, adjust to changes in global customer requirements, and a constantly evolving global technology industry.”

The transparent display we offer for sale (CFAL12856A0-0151) is an OLED (Organic Light Emitting Diode) display. OLED displays produce images by emitting light in the corresponding color. To produce black in a normal OLED, the pixels are simply turned off. With the transparent display, if the pixels are turned off, the display is transparent rather than black.

We’ve heard from a few customers requests for transparent displays with black graphics as well as requests for larger transparent displays. This guide will walk you through creating a transparent display out of a graphic LCD.