Cyberpunk Advertising Signs
Working out how it works
The first thing I needed to do was create some kind of schematic of which pins of which chips connected to which other pins on which other ICs. This involved the painful, tedious job of putting a multimeter onto every pin of the microcontroller, eeprom chip and every other IC on the circuit board, then finding which other component it was connected to. This was a long and slow job.
But eventually, I got an idea of which pins connected to what.
With this information, I was able to start again. From scratch. From the very start.
The original firmware had taken about four months to develop fully. I’d decided that this was going to be a quick-and-dirty project, and gave myself a full working week (Monday – Friday) at most. If it wasn’t working by the end of the week, I’d give up and simply paint large advertising hoardings on by buildings instead!
This meant reading and dechipering lots of datasheets….
… and, not knowing (or rather, not being able to remember) anything about the controller on the LCD screen, trying out lots of different intialise routines to try to get the screen to switch on
It took me no less than two and a half days to get the screen to even switch on! And when it did, the display was nothing but a load of static. This wasn’t going to be as straight-forward as I first thought…..
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