neato lcd screen replacement free sample

Removing and replacing the LCD screen on your Botvac requires the removal of a couple of other components in order to gain access to it. Included in this guide are instructions on how to remove the battery and brushes. Make sure to keep these components organized in your removal process to ensure an easy re-assembly process.

The Neato XV-11(Wikipedia) is a robot which vacuum’s your house. It is unlike any other however because it includes a low cost 360 degree laser distance scanner (LIDAR See Wikipedia). This can be removed from the XV-11 and used in your own robotics projects or used within the XV-11 with the help of the Robot Operating System (ROS). The pages within this wiki document interfacing methods into the XV-11 and is open to anyone who wants to help. For $399 you can’t find a better robotics platform in my opinion, definitely worth the cost even if you do nothing more than strip it down for parts. You will find it is very well constructed by some people who definitely know about robotics.

You will see which keys are used to navigate on the screen once the program is running. The default speed settings are too fast for the XV-11 so you need to reduce the speed before it will respond to any input. Repeatedly press the “x” key to reduce speed when traveling in a straight line to about 0.10 and then do the same with the “c” key to reduce rotational speed to about 0.15. Now you can use the keyboard keys to navigate.

From this point you need to create your own map using gmapping and save the map so a map of your area is loaded when launching 2dnav_neato. gmapping needs to be modified from the base install on your system at this point to correct the reversed laser scan data. This wiki will be updated shortly with that procedure. gmapping is what will allow you to create a map of your surroundings which you will use to navigate.

A version 2.6 Neato XV-11 can be reverted to a previous firmware by pressing and holding the Back button (curved arrow) and the orange Start button at the same time for 4 seconds. When the robot reboots it will be running an older firmware with all the previous commands available.

Anyone who has updated their Neato firmware will notice a new message is returned when you enter ” Help” when connected to the robots USB port. Entering Help with a space before it used to return an extended hidden help menu with a lot more commands! When Neato released the 2.6 firmware update (or maybe earlier?) they removed the ” Help” and instead you got this response...

Neato is great in cleaning by it self, it also has good “spot clean” algorithm! But, what if you want to clean just a certain spot? In other words - use it like a regular vacuum?

As you may know, you can manually control Neato right out of the box by connecting it to any computer via usb and, through any terminal program, send commands to robot (for some reason article describing command list on official Neato site is unreachable at this moment, but you can get it by typing ‘help’). The way you can control Neato movements is described here: XV-11 API Commands

This is really great, but how can one use it for robot’s intended purpose if he or she is limited by the length of the wire? Of course you can take a laptop!  But for me it was not the answer. Luckily, my friend recently has brought a compact (very compact) WiFi router (Commonly available from eBay as “2g/3g/4g wifi router”, also known as HAME MPR-A5 and MIFI-F5. MPR-A1 and clones are likely to work as well if you manage to fit them in. Some additional material is available on http://my-embedded.blogspot.com/2013/12/mini-4g-router-rt5350f.html) and suggested that we should try to embed it into my Neato.

So, it was obvious that all we needed was to find +5V power supply and connect usb from router to neato’s usb. All that sounds simple, so we did it. (i should say that my Neato has rev.64 main board)

Very soon we realized that, first of all - there is no powerful enough +5V source on the main board, and the second one - Neato’s software blocks it from normal functioning if it senses power supply on its usb

Answer to the second problem was a bit tricky! On the router board there is a source of power which can be turned on/off by changing state of its GPIO8 (echo 1 >/sys/class/gpio/gpio8/value), so my friend suggested that we will be able to control usb power supply by one P-N-P transistor witch base must be connected to that gpio. All that going to be great if only router could gave us +5V, but its voltage is only +3.3V. In the end the answer was found: we’d connected +5V from DC-DC to the Neato’s usb through one p-n-p and one n-p-n transistor (with a pair of resistors) controlled by the router’s +3.3V as shown below.

So now i have a fully functional Neato with a full control from any place in the world ;) I can remotely start cleaning in full cycle, or change its schedule, or use it full manual, or, even, just play like with RC car!

The open source parts of the code are provided on the CD labeled as “Neato Vacuum User Guide” that comes with the robot. The source is located under the directory “LinuxSrc”

The Neato then reappears on the serial bus (on Windows you might have to unplug and reconnect the USB cable for this device to appear) as an another device “XV-11 BOOTLOADER”

Contents of the folder LinuxSrc\boot indicate that U-boot is, or was used as, bootloader on the Neato at some point “Hopefully u-boot doesn’t make it to production, but if it does.., LinuxSrc\boot\arch\arm\cpu\lpc313, line 453.

A lot of the functions available to programmers can only be used if “TestMode” has been enabled on the Neato. Most functions displayed in the Help are listed as “TestMode Only” which will give you an idea as to what can be only be used when TestMode is enabled.

When you are first experimenting with command, I recommend you turn Neato up-side-down so the wheels can free spin. Otherwise you may get instances where your robot drives away faster than you expected, crashing into things and generally making a mess of your room as it lacks logic to stop.

As I tested in firmware 2.6, Neato’s maximum speed is 300. If you exceed this value, Neato will report back something like “Invalid Speed Specified(500). Must be between 0 and 300”

As I have been experimenting, my Neato seems to steer to the left a little as it drives along in a ‘straight’ line. I’ve also had differences in distance travelled depending on my speed setting. I have yet to sit down and measure the accuracy of these movement commands.

A little issue I found in my tinkering exploits, Neato would suddenly power off when issuing commands. This seems to be because I was issuing a large amount of commands within a short period of time. To give you an idea, I was issuing a set of three SetLED commands once every 20ms. Within about 2seconds, Neato would power off. To fix the issue, unplug your USB, power up Neato and reconnect the USB.

IMPORTANT LCD INFORMATION!!! As you can see in the first image, the LCD is labeled “GVLCM128128G 13572A” on its backside. Googling this brings up the following LCD producer: Golden Vision. However, this exact LCD is not listed on their site, but this similar one is. All the measurable specs are similar (dimensions are approximately the same - the XV-11’s LCD measures approximately 61.6 mm x 55.1 mm x 4.36 mm, which is a bit thicker, probably due to the backlight; 128 x 128 resolution). The only differences I could find are the small white line above the ribbon cable at the bottom of the “similar” LCD isn’t present on the XV-11 LCD, and the ribbon cable of the “similar” LCD is 24 pins, not 25 (so the “similar” LCD CANNOT BE USED AS A REPLACEMENT - IT WOULDN’T BE PIN COMPATIBLE!). Anyway, the company only lists a few 128x128 LCD’s in production (none of which match the XV-11’s), so this narrows down the list of possible LCD controllers used in the XV-11’s LCD to just the ST7541 (others are possible but you could say these are more likely since we know this is the only chip the company uses in their 128x128 greyscale LCD’s). We can’t be sure until we test out driving this LCD standalone (on my TODO list for the next 2 weeks - I’m waiting on a FFC Ribbon Cable Breakout to come in from New Haven Display (look here if interested), but from what the datasheet says and the fact that only 2 of the LCD’s ribbon cable pins are appear to have data running thru them, it seems like the LCD is controlled by i2c from the main board (see below for pinouts).

The buttons on the LCD board have a pair of legs connected to ground, so it’s safe to deduce that the main board has these buttons’ signals pulled up (these pullups are not found on the LCD board) and expects to read a LOW signal when these buttons are pressed down. See table below for which button is which.

K1, K2, and K3 labeled in the second image are 3 of the 4 pins attaching the LCD backlight to the PCB. These pins go thru resistors to Q1, which appears to be a transistor driven by pin 10 of the white FFC ribbon cable (going to the mainboard). When a voltage is applied to Q1, it connects K(1-3) to GND, turning the backlight ON. K4, the last of the backlight’s pins, connects to pin 14 of the white FFC ribbon cable (see table below for appropriate voltages).

IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER: I did my best to determine all the dimensions, but there are likely some minor inaccuracies. Looking at the XV-11’s case, the LCD PCB fits snugly in the outline and all the buttons and LED’s have to line up nicely with the plastic to work properly. If for whatever reason you want to use these files to produce a custom LCD peripheral board, just be warned it may not work (but this is probably your best chance at a template for one).

On the surface, the Neato Robotics XV-11 vacuum cleaner seems like just another Roomba with a square front, but it caught our attention because of the cheap and innovative Lidar device it uses to sense the room it"s cleaning. It claims to "map" the room it is in and detect doorways so that it can clean a whole room before exiting. So we went ahead and ordered one to tear-down and hack. Then on November 15th, RobotBox announced a $200 prize for the first person to post usable Lidar code. At the time of this writing, the purse is up to $800. While we don"t have a usable hack (yet, muahahaha), we did a thorough tear-down and sniffed around the Lidar signals for all you hackers that don"t want to drop $400 on a vacuum.

On first start up, the bot made some cutesy beep-boop robot noises and insisted that we charge its battery (the robot always refers to itself in the first person on its LCD display). So we stuck it on its wall-charging station for a while. Nothing fancy here, just a couple of spring-loaded contacts that press on the contacts on the back of the bot. However, Neato made the base charger as a simple structure for a standard power supply so the user can remove the power supply and plug it in if desired.

You can see the Lidar assembly sitting on top of the main processor board, the drive motor for the brush, and the daughterboard for the LCD and buttons. In the front of the bot, we can also see the optical switches for cliff detection, as well as the magnetic sensors that detect the magnetic strip. The Lidar device sits on top of the mainboard, which is controlled by a beefy AT91SAM9XE. Since the Lidar is what we"re most interested in, we pulled it off first.