space engineer lcd panel supplier

The various LCD Panel blocks are a great way to add a human touch to a ship or base by displaying useful images or text. For LCD configuration and usage, see LCD Surface Options.

Note: Some functional blocks, such as Cockpits, Programmable Blocks, Custom Turret Controllers, and Button Panels, have customizable LCD surfaces built in that work the same way as LCD Panel blocks, which are also discussed in detail under LCD Surface Options.

LCD Panels need to be built on a powered grid to work. Without power, they display an "Offline" text. While powered without having a text, image, or script set up, they display "Online".

LCD Panel blocks come in a variety of sizes from tiny to huge (see list below) and are available for large and small grid sizes. Note that LCD Panel blocks all have connections on their backs, and very few also on a second side.

All LCD Panels and LCD surfaces work with the same principle: They are capable of displaying dynamic scripts, or few inbuilt static images accompanied by editable text. Access the ship"s Control Panel Screen to configure LCD Panels or LCD surfaces; or face the LCD Panel block and press "K".

A Text Panel, despite its name, can also display images. On large grid, it is rectangular and does not fully cover the side of a 1x1x1 block. On small grid it is 1x1x1, the smallest possible LCD block in game.

On large grid, you choose the Text Panel when you need something that has rectangular dimensions that make it look like a wall-mounted TV or computer screen. If you want to display images, this one works best with the built-in posters whose names end in "H" or "V" (for horizontal or vertical rotation). On Small grid, you place these tiny display surfaces so you can see them well while seated in a cockpit or control seat, to create a custom display array of flight and status information around you.

Corner LCDs are much smaller display panels that typically hold a few lines of text. They don"t cover the block you place them on and are best suited as signage for doors, passages, or containers. They are less suitable for displaying images, even though it"s possible. If you enable the "Keep aspect ratio" option, the image will take up less than a third of the available space.

These huge Sci-Fi LCD Panels come in sizes of 5x5, 5x3, and 3x3 blocks, and can be built on large grids only. These panels are only available to build if you purchase the "Sparks of the Future" pack DLC.

They work the same as all other LCD Panels, the only difference is that they are very large. In the scenario that comes with the free "Sparks of the Future" update, they are used prominently as advertisement boards on an asteroid station.

This LCD panel can be built on large and small grids. The transparent LCD is basically a 1x1x1 framed window that displays images and text. It is part of the paid "Decorative Blocks Pack #2" DLC.

What is special about them is that if you set the background color to black, this panel becomes a transparent window with a built-in display. In contrast to other LCD Panels it has no solid backside, which makes it ideal to construct transparent cockpit HUDs, or simply as cosmetic decoration.

While configuring an LCD Panel, the GUI covers up the display in-world and you can"t see how the text or images comes out. In the UI Options, you can lower the UI Background opacity to be translucent, so you can watch what you are doing more easily.

After many requests, we have decided to release our internal Replay Tool that we use to create our trailers. It allows you to record the movement and actions of multiple characters in the same world. You can use your video recording software of choice to capture these moments for cinematic purposes! It’s also super useful for epic screenshot creation. The tool allows you to be the director of your own Space Engineers film where you can carefully position and time different engineers with their own specific roles. We are extremely excited to see what the community will create with this!

Important: because it’s an internal tool, it has a very basic user interface and required advanced users to be used. We believe this is OK, because most video creators who would want to use it to create epic cinematic Space Engineers videos are advanced users.

There are now Steam trading cards to collect for Space Engineers! Collect a full set of cards to earn items that help you customize your Steam profile including backgrounds and badges.

There are fourteen new decorative blocks for people who want to buy them and support the development of Space Engineers, which are available on the Space Engineers Steam Store page. Within the package you will get following new blocks:

Beds can preserve characters’ inventory and toolbar while they"re offline and keeps them alive as long as there is oxygen available. Is considered to be the same as the Cryo Chamber Block, except oxygen is used from the environment. Space Engineers don’t work from nine to five, they work whenever they’re needed: day or night, during peace and war. But when it’s time to call it a day, every engineer looks forward to resting in these beds.

Standard and Corner Desks can be used as seats, which allow players to sit on the chair attached to it. Combine these blocks to produce various designs and sizes, creativity has no limitation. Whether designing new schematics or charting a fresh course to another world, desks are essential for any engineer looking to get some work done.

Kitchens are purely decorative. The kitchens in Space Engineers come well-equipped and include stunning visual details. Space Engineers overcome challenges everyday when they’re working on new planets or among the stars.

Planters are purely decorative, but they make outer space a bit warmer by housing life in a special glass container. Build your own garden on the space station. Planters not only help to liven up spaces, but the flora housed inside these capsules also remind many engineers of the homes they’ve left behind in order to explore the universe.

Couchescan be used as seats, so take your time to relax and take a break. You don’t need to always run, fly or work, you can enjoy your cozy room and enjoy the view. The last thing anyone would ever call a Space Engineer is ‘couch potato’, but who wouldn’t like to relax after a hard day’s work on this comfy furniture?

Armory and Armory Lockers can be used to decorate interiors and store weapons, ammunition, tools and bottles; both are small storages (400L), where you can keep your equipment. Space Engineers use lockers in order to ensure that keepsakes from home, toiletries and other items are kept safe.

Toiletscan be used as a seat. The latest and greatest interstellar lavatory technology has made many earth dwellers jealous of the facilities enjoyed by Space Engineers.

Toilet Seat that can be used as a seat and is fit for the creator of the legendary Red Ship; most engineers don’t want to get up after ‘taking care of business’.

Industrial Cockpits are used to control your ships. This industrial cockpit in both small and large grid versions will make your creations look much better. Offering unmatched visibility, the industrial cockpit enables engineers to experience stunning vistas while traversing landscapes and space.

Console blocks project blueprints for downscaled ships and stations, as well as display pictograms or customizable text. They are fantastic functional LCD panels where you can project your creations and show them to your friends. The sleek and crystal clear picture offered by this console allows Space Engineers to display designs and other important information.

Keen Software House needs to stay profitable in order to continue development and support of Space Engineers, and to take risks, to invest into experiments that may not pay off in the short term, and to develop innovative concepts.

A:Actually, even this update isn’t paid. The major part of this update (LCD screens, Replay Tool, new music tracks, smaller improvements) is free for everyone. Only the smaller and not mandatory part is paid - Decorative Pack, which you can purchase here.

A: To support future development of Space Engineers and other leading-edge projects we plan to work on at Keen Software House. Players kept asking us for something they could buy to support the development of Space Engineers, and the Decorative Pack is a great option for them.

A: Right after Space Engineers left early access and all hot issues were resolved. Most of the work was done by the Art team, the rest of the developers is working on other long-term updates.

A: We want more people to play Space Engineers, which means we must lower the barrier of entry. When the Space Engineers community grows, everyone benefits from this - more content on Workshop, more mods, more new ideas, more people to play with. This means that all non-mandatory features should be optional, so only those who really want them can pay for them. That’s why we decreased the price of Space Engineers, and made the Decorative Pack an optional purchase.

The LCD Panel is a thin panel that takes an entire block face and can display a variety of messages and textures that can be displayed constantly or triggered by the Programmable Block, Sensor, Timer Block, or any other block capable of triggering.

The "Color" sliders allow setting the text colour using RGB slider and "Backgr." allows setting background fill colours (default black). If using a transparent LCD then the text will be against transparency unless fill colour is added.

"Loaded Textures" has a list of the available default and modded (where applicable) images available for display on the screen. Select the desired image and select "Add to selection". The selected image will then show in the second "Selected textures" panel.

When multiple images are applied they can be set to cycle between with the duration between images being set by the "Image change interval" slider. To remove an image from display select it in the second panel and select "Remove selected".

The "Preserve aspect ratio" checkbox can be used to prevent the image being stretched if it does not fit the screen properly such as when using a wide LCD.

To set the LCD to display a script, choose "Script" from the dropdown. Choosing Script allows the display of information such as weather, artificial horizon for vehicles, Energy and Hydrogen level etc.

The panel"s title and text can be made public, private, or a combination of both. Textures applied can be selected from a list or custom textures can be selected. Textures can be set to rotate on a timer, changing from one to the next. GPS coordinates shown in the GPS format in the text panel will appear in the GPS and can be activated (=shown on HUD).

The LCD Panel could be accessed with the programmable block as IMyTextPanel. It could work in ´Texture Mode´ in which the selected textures are shown or the ´Text Mode´ in which the text is shown. The following methods are available:

From cinema content to motion-based digital art, Planar® Luxe MicroLED Displays offer a way to enrich distinctive spaces. HDR support and superior dynamic range create vibrant, high-resolution canvases for creative expression and entertainment. Leading-edge MicroLED technology, design adaptability and the slimmest profiles ensure they seamlessly integrate with architectural elements and complement interior décor.

From cinema content to motion-based digital art, Planar® Luxe Displays offer a way to enrich distinctive spaces. These professional-grade displays provide vibrant, high-resolution canvases for creative expression and entertainment. Leading-edge technology, design adaptability and the slimmest profiles ensure they seamlessly integrate with architectural elements and complement interior decor.

From cinema content to motion-based digital art, Planar® Luxe MicroLED Displays offer a way to enrich distinctive spaces. HDR support and superior dynamic range create vibrant, high-resolution canvases for creative expression and entertainment. Leading-edge MicroLED technology, design adaptability and the slimmest profiles ensure they seamlessly integrate with architectural elements and complement interior décor.

a line of extreme and ultra-narrow bezel LCD displays that provides a video wall solution for demanding requirements of 24x7 mission-critical applications and high ambient light environments

The intelligent TFT LCD Module with UART PORT which can be controlled by ANY MCU via Simple Powerful Command Set. So it can be used as colourful TFT Display & Touch controller in various electronic equipment. The intelligent TFT LCD Module include CPU , TFT Driver, Flash Memory, UART port, power supply and so on, the important is that it has the ready-made Basic Control Program and Powerful Design Software, so that it can reduce much development time and cost for engineers.

The Space Engineers – Sparks of the Future includes the Sci-Fi LCD, the Neon Tubes, the Sci-Fi Ion Thrusters, the Sci-Fi Atmospheric Thrusters, the Sci-Fi Interior Wall, the Bar Counter, the Sci-Fi Control Panel, the Sci-Fi 1-Button Panel, the Sci-Fi 4-Button Panel, the Sci-Fi Sliding Door, the Sci-Fi Armor Skin, the 2 Neon Armor Skins, the 8 new character emotes.

Display sorted lists of your base inventory contents! Display bar charts of power supply, demand, and storage or of cargo capacity, usage, and free space. Display multiple charts on one LCD panel!

This creates one chart tracking the Inv Exec Time series for script execution time, with the default options: fill the entire panel, have the bars aligned vertically and time horizontal.

This places three charts onto one display folowing the Stored Power, Power In and Power Out series. It also overrides the default layout so that they tile one above the other taking up about a third of the height of the panel each and the full width.

Zephyr Industries Inventory Display is open source, under an MIT license. You can contribute to or copy the code at https://github.com/illusori/space-engineers-zi-inventory-display.

If you’ve ever tried to connect an LCD display to an Arduino, you might have noticed that it consumes a lot of pins on the Arduino. Even in 4-bit mode, the Arduino still requires a total of seven connections – which is half of the Arduino’s available digital I/O pins.

The solution is to use an I2C LCD display. It consumes only two I/O pins that are not even part of the set of digital I/O pins and can be shared with other I2C devices as well.

True to their name, these LCDs are ideal for displaying only text/characters. A 16×2 character LCD, for example, has an LED backlight and can display 32 ASCII characters in two rows of 16 characters each.

At the heart of the adapter is an 8-bit I/O expander chip – PCF8574. This chip converts the I2C data from an Arduino into the parallel data required for an LCD display.

If you are using multiple devices on the same I2C bus, you may need to set a different I2C address for the LCD adapter so that it does not conflict with another I2C device.

An important point here is that several companies manufacture the same PCF8574 chip, Texas Instruments and NXP Semiconductors, to name a few. And the I2C address of your LCD depends on the chip manufacturer.

So your LCD probably has a default I2C address 0x27Hex or 0x3FHex. However it is recommended that you find out the actual I2C address of the LCD before using it.

Connecting an I2C LCD is much easier than connecting a standard LCD. You only need to connect 4 pins instead of 12. Start by connecting the VCC pin to the 5V output on the Arduino and GND to ground.

After wiring up the LCD you’ll need to adjust the contrast of the display. On the I2C module you will find a potentiometer that you can rotate with a small screwdriver.

Plug in the Arduino’s USB connector to power the LCD. You will see the backlight lit up. Now as you turn the knob on the potentiometer, you will start to see the first row of rectangles. If that happens, Congratulations! Your LCD is working fine.

To drive an I2C LCD you must first install a library called LiquidCrystal_I2C. This library is an enhanced version of the LiquidCrystal library that comes with your Arduino IDE.

The I2C address of your LCD depends on the manufacturer, as mentioned earlier. If your LCD has a Texas Instruments’ PCF8574 chip, its default I2C address is 0x27Hex. If your LCD has NXP Semiconductors’ PCF8574 chip, its default I2C address is 0x3FHex.

So your LCD probably has I2C address 0x27Hex or 0x3FHex. However it is recommended that you find out the actual I2C address of the LCD before using it. Luckily there’s an easy way to do this, thanks to the Nick Gammon.

But, before you proceed to upload the sketch, you need to make a small change to make it work for you. You must pass the I2C address of your LCD and the dimensions of the display to the constructor of the LiquidCrystal_I2C class. If you are using a 16×2 character LCD, pass the 16 and 2; If you’re using a 20×4 LCD, pass 20 and 4. You got the point!

In ‘setup’ we call three functions. The first function is init(). It initializes the LCD object. The second function is clear(). This clears the LCD screen and moves the cursor to the top left corner. And third, the backlight() function turns on the LCD backlight.

After that we set the cursor position to the third column of the first row by calling the function lcd.setCursor(2, 0). The cursor position specifies the location where you want the new text to be displayed on the LCD. The upper left corner is assumed to be col=0, row=0.

There are some useful functions you can use with LiquidCrystal_I2C objects. Some of them are listed below:lcd.home() function is used to position the cursor in the upper-left of the LCD without clearing the display.

lcd.scrollDisplayRight() function scrolls the contents of the display one space to the right. If you want the text to scroll continuously, you have to use this function inside a for loop.

lcd.scrollDisplayLeft() function scrolls the contents of the display one space to the left. Similar to above function, use this inside a for loop for continuous scrolling.

If you find the characters on the display dull and boring, you can create your own custom characters (glyphs) and symbols for your LCD. They are extremely useful when you want to display a character that is not part of the standard ASCII character set.

CGROM is used to store all permanent fonts that are displayed using their ASCII codes. For example, if we send 0x41 to the LCD, the letter ‘A’ will be printed on the display.

CGRAM is another memory used to store user defined characters. This RAM is limited to 64 bytes. For a 5×8 pixel based LCD, only 8 user-defined characters can be stored in CGRAM. And for 5×10 pixel based LCD only 4 user-defined characters can be stored.

After the library is included and the LCD object is created, custom character arrays are defined. The array consists of 8 bytes, each byte representing a row of a 5×8 LED matrix. In this sketch, eight custom characters have been created.

Over the last 6 months I have had this problem,, it starts fine, but the screens, LCD, or cockpit screens, stop updating,, I can use F to view the new info, but the screens themselfs take a long time, and looks to only tick 1-3 times, then waiting upto 5 min. It started 6 months ago, once I had 5-10 ships moving,, Now its first ship, or even the base, before any ships are setup.

It is commonly held that a team at the RCA David Sarnoff Research Center in Princeton, NJ under the leadership of George H. Heilmeier did the initial development of liquid crystal displays (LCDs), in particular of the Dynamic Scattering Mode (DSM) LCD.

In 2002, a comprehensive history of LCDsSharp Corporation, a major competitor of Casio Computer Co., and some "survivorship bias" concerning persons and institutions still engaged in LCD work, had an influence on the sources used.

As the very first Member of Technical Staff doing work on LCDs at the Brown, Boveri Research Center in Baden, Switzerland, I have recently become personally motivated to give my account of less known events that took place while I was employed by BBC from 1969 to 1980. First, some personal background:

In 1959 I started my studies in electrical engineering at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich). There were only two tracks to choose from at that time: power electrical engineering and what was called Schwachstromtechnik, which translated means low-current technology. This was basically an electronics curriculum and my preference. Part of the program was a mandatory internship in industry of at least half a year through which I was to gain some practical experience. I fulfilled this requirement as well as military service during my vacations. That way I did not have to sacrifice an entire year in order to accomplish the internship and military service, which is still compulsory for all Swiss men up to this day. In hindsight, my thesis was very much at the forefront of ultrasound medical instrumentation. My thesis partner and I had to develop the circuitry for a device to measure the flow in blood vessels with pulsed ultrasonic waves. This work was done within the high-frequency electronics department of Fritz E. Borgnis. I graduated as Diplomingenieur at the end of 1963.

Later that year, I joined Beckman Instruments in the East Bay across from San Francisco as a design engineer working on electronic measuring equipment. My choice had to do with the proximity of UC Berkeley (Cal), where I took extension classes in the evenings to improve my English and learn FORTRAN programming.

A new facility for its research center was opened in the Stanford Industrial Park at Hillview Avenue in Palo Alto. I moved to Palo Alto and drove across the Bay Bridge to attend classes at CAL. While I was studying at Berkeley from 1966 to 1968, political student activities on the campus were in full bloom, but these were for me not more than a sideshow. At Friden I conceived a potential electronic replacement for the magnetic wire memory in the desktop electronic calculator. Transistors were relatively expensive. Therefore, using flip-flops with two transistors to store bits was not an option. I proposed a type of dynamic shift register using basically one transistor and capacitor per stage in 1967. Unlike the concept of a Bucket Brigade for analog voltages as first published by Philips researchers in 1969 and later implemented as Charge-Coupled Devices, my circuit was intended to shift digital bit information in a serial memory. This is when I learned about the US custom of writing an invention report. It made me aware of the importance of patent notebooks and filings during my later work on LCDs (see section Patents).

Brown, Boveri & Cie (BBC)] was a traditional Swiss electrical engineering company founded by two immigrants in the 19th century. Their equipment and services for electric power generation and distribution as well as plant engineering for industries were well known and sold worldwide. A newer electronics division was active in process control, power semiconductors and telecommunications. The Swiss headquarters had difficulties managing the mighty German subsidiary which was much bigger than the Swiss operations. In order to strengthen R&D as well as underscore their local position, BBC opened a new research center based in Switzerland. Ambros P. Speiser was hired for this task. He had already founded and managed the IBM Zurich Research Center from 1956 to 1966, which had been the first research facility of IBM in Europe.

In May 1969 BBC entered a formal cooperation with Hoffmann-La Roche (Roche) entitled Medical Electronics, in which various common projects were studied, such as a new mobile intensive care unit. I was asked by F. K. von Willisen to look into display technologies as part of the BBC side of the cooperation. On December 11th 1969 I gave an overview of state-of-the-art display technologies including RCA"s work on LCDs at an internal BBC symposium. At the same venue Gerhard Meier of the Fraunhofer Institute in Freiburg, Germany, explained liquid crystals in detail. This institute already had a tradition of LC research. There was an exchange of staff and knowledge between this institute and a team at the Kent State University LC Institute, where Alfred Saupe and Juergen Nehring worked at the time.

In following with the conclusions of internal reports by both sides, LCDs were established as a common research project. I became the very first person at BBC to work full time on LCDs, while Roche assigned organic chemists and hired additional physicists. Roche concentrated on the synthesis of LC substances suitable for LCDs and the physics of electrooptical effects in LC structures. BBC developed the corresponding cell technology, explored applications and driving electronics. It was a truly interdisciplinary effort. I set up a small team with a young electrical engineer and a couple of technical assistants to develop a suitable cell technology. We used a pyrolytic process to deposit metaloxyd transparent electrodes on glass substrates. The disadvantage of this approach was that edging of electrode patterns was difficult. It was exiting to work with our first LCDs exhibiting the Dynamic Scattering Mode (DSM) discovered by RCA. A common project with ROCHE called for patient monitoring to indicate crucial measurements as part of new life support equipment, so we studied bar graph displays.

We found that we needed an array of several quasi-analog bar displays side-by-side, which led us to study simple matrix displays. We certainly were among the first to study the limitations of matrix-addressed LCDs, and I disclosed some of the results at conferences later-on. In an experimental unit we connected a discrete capacitor in parallel to each LC segment and decoupled the segment with a diode from the driving electronics when not selected.TFT) and a storage capacitor at each pixel.

Early on I did measurements of the electrooptic threshold voltage in LCDs. As a simple matrix LCD requires sequential addressing of rows (scanning, multiplexing) with a periodic refresh, pulsed voltages have to be applied to the segments/pixels. In 1972, I found by varying the pulse width that the threshold, measured as RMS voltage, remains nearly constant.

A major milestone was the discovery of the 90-degree Twisted Nematic field effect (TN cell) and its properties by Wolfgang Helfrich and Martin Schadt, physicists at Roche. The corresponding patent application was filed on December 4th, 1970 (see section Patents). When new LC substances were developed for TN LCDs by chemists at Roche, we demonstrated the good cooperation by publishing the result together.

I probably did the first public demonstration of a working Twisted Nematic LCD, at least in Europe, at the IEE Conference on Displays organized by the University of Loughborough, UK, in September 1971. It was a transparent, quasi-analog bar TN LCD that I put on an overhead projector to show it to the audience. By varying the voltage applied, the bar moved up and down. It aroused much interest, and a I received a question from a participant about small, noticeably inhomogeneous areas, which were later identified as domains of reverse twist.

Unfortunately the common projects with Roche came to an end as early as March 1972. Roche had bought Electro-Médicine Dassault, France, which maintained some activities that were directly competing with some of the work at BBC (not related to LCDs). Our management considered this as a breach of confidence. Thereafter Roche became a supplier of LC substances to BBC. I played a role in evaluating Roche mixtures for our displays.

Early on Georges Keller, head of the electronic components division of BBC, became interested in LCDs. He provided the support of his glass technology experts at the tube division. Since initially we used a Schiff-base LC mixture for our TN displays, we had to hermetically seal our cells with glass frit bonding along the edges at high temperatures to avoid humidity entering the cell. This prevented us from using the common technique of orienting the LC molecules by rubbing an organic layer (a surfactant) on the glass surface. We employed a vacuum-deposited layer of SiO instead, where the structure for orientation is defined by the evaporation angle. The electrodes were manufactured with a new vacuum deposition process optimized by Balzers Ltd. in the neighboring Principality of Liechtenstein.

Prototype displays were made for a joint-effort wristwatch project that we did together with Ebauches SA, the major Swiss watch movements manufacturer (now part of the Swatch Group) and Faselec, the Swiss IC subsidiary of Philips. A working quartz digital wristwatch was shown at the MUBA fair in March 1973. It contained chips made by Faselec and our 8-digit TN LCD.

Georges Keller asked me to provide the technology part for a business plan to industrially manufacture LCDs. The main customers envisioned were wristwatch manufacturers. A pilot line was set up at the BBC tube factory in Birrfeld during 1973. Top management approved the business plan and credit to construct a brand new plant in Lenzburg.

As far as I know, it was the first dedicated factory worldwide, built from scratch, measuring 39,000 square feet, exclusively to manufacture TN LCDs in volume. ILIXCO had a small-scale operation in the US (comparable to a pilot line), and Sharp of Japan started with DSM LCDs for their calculators about at the same time. BBC built an additional LCD factory of 47,000 square feet in 1978.

Nobody knew in 1973 whether the new LCDs would have a sufficient operating life expectancy. I was charged to set up and supervise accelerated tests at elevated temperatures and voltages to get some clues. As a result, we improved our cell technology. I left the research center and joined the new LCD division in the capacity of deputy head to develop applications and manage part of the activities such as custom design of new LCDs, contacts with LC substance suppliers, IC manufacturers, testing and patent matters.

During the following years a lot of effort was needed to automate manufacturing. Labor costs in Switzerland were (and still are) high. The process chosen initially was not well suited for larger substrates and low-cost manufacturing. BBC was not any more willing to finance expansion in an area not important to its basic business. Therefore, a 50/50 joint venture was set up with Philips of The Netherlands at the beginning of 1980, called Videlec AG. Philips had a strong interest in display technologies for their consumer products, in particular the potential use of LCDs in TV sets.

The Japanese officer of Oki Electric from Germany, who was with us on that day, took a bow nearly to the ground when he greeted this influential man from the center of his Keiretsu. OKI Electric was interesting for us as a partner because they had a CMOS fab in Japan and were in line to become an LSI supplier for Casio wristwatches. Casio planned to diversify into quartz watches, where similar components were needed as in electronic pocket calculators. After many discussions and the evaluation of our LCD samples, we were chosen to be the LCD supplier for the new wristwatches. On one occasion we had the honor of being invited for dinner at a typically Japanese restaurant in Tokyo by Mr. Kashio, one of the founding brothers. In 1974 our new factory for TN LCDs became operational. The Casiotron digital wristwatch with some interesting new features was released with our custom made LCD in October 1974. Not everything went smoothly. We encountered yield and delivery problems which required several trips to Tokyo to see Casio people.

Due to price pressure and the fact that customers were mainly in Asia, BBC started an LCD assembly line in Hongkong. I had to travel to HK to instruct local employees, first for final testing, then for doing custom designs.

We probably were among the first to develop backlit TN LCDs. Since LCDs do not emit light themselves, they need ambient light or a dedicated light source for viewing. Wristwatches in particular cannot be read in the dark without some form of illumination. Therefore, at our laboratory we developed a suitable backlighting scheme, taking into account the limited space available in a wristwatch with a digital liquid crystal display. Our patented solution included a thin plastic diffuser plate behind the LCD with a miniature incandescent light bulb at its side.edge-lit in present-day flatscreen LCD television sets using LEDs as light sources.

The major difference is that the backlight is continuously on during the operation of an LCD TV set, whereas in wristwatches the backlight is only used while pushing a button in order to save battery power. When enough ambient light is available, the display is used in its reflective mode. This combination is called a transflective display.

A different solution was developed for panel-mounted meters that were proposed by BBC for power and industrial control centers. Reflective TN LCDs were conceived as bargraph replacements for conventional electromechanical meters, but were difficult to read under low ambient light, as they are mounted vertically. Therefore, we used a cold-cathode fluorescent lamp (CCFL) and a diffuser to backlight our bargraph display as shown on the right-hand side of the picture. This was much easier to read than the purely reflective type on the left.

Switzerland. The Swiss authorities only examined strictly new developments in the watch and textile machine sectors. Otherwise patents were granted rather freely, but could be challenged later-on at a trial. When RCA defended their patent application with a broad claim for digital electronic wristwatches containing a battery, quartz crystal, frequency divider and LCD, I was asked by the Bulova Watch Co. to testify against this claim. We showed that, based on the disclosed information, it was not possible to make a wristwatch with an adequate temperature range on the priority date. Therefore the patent was not granted in Switzerland.

USA. In the US, the examination process was not public and the duration unpredictable until a patent was granted and published. In addition, priority could be established before the filing date, if relevant patent notebook entries or other evidence was presented by the inventor. This opportunity did not exist in Europe. A famous case was the invention of the twisted nematic, field effect LCD. Roche filed this patent application on December 4th, 1970 in Switzerland establishing thereby a priority. James Fergason followed more than four months later filing a similar patent application in the US on April 22nd, 1971. However, Fergason presented patent notebook entries, witnessed by colleagues, predating the priority date of Roche. In my opinion this gave unfair advantage to US filers.

For Roche as well as BBC (which after the merger with ASEA from Sweden in 1987 changed their name to ABB) royalty income from their LCD patents became a substantial source of income.

Working at the forefront of a new technology is exciting. I could attend many conferences, learned to make presentations and was invited to lecture on topics relating to my work on LCDs. Early recognition was evident in that I received invitations to make presentations at UC Berkeley, at the IEEE EUROCON conference and organize a panel discussion at the École Polytechnique de l"Université de Lausanne (EPUL) in 1972. During several years I gave a lecture at the Technische Akademie Esslingen near Stuttgart, Germany. As the only Swiss among many German lecturers, it was gratifying to get good ratings by participants from industry.

I left BBC in 1980 to work in the field of telecommunications. In 1983 my former colleagues from the BBC Research Center invented the Super-Twisted Nematic LCD (STN-LCD), which made it possible to have passive-matrix flat-panel displays with many pixels and reasonably high resolution for the first time.Game Boy, cellular phones, viewfinders of cameras, etc. I like to believe that this invention was a successful follow-up of our earlier focus on improving matrix addressing of LCDs. The corresponding patent brought in millions from licenses. Shortly thereafter Videlec in Lenzburg ceased operations, and the LC staff at the BBC Research Center was reduced to a skeleton.