How to get small LCD screen connected to Raspberry Pi

Markercartoons · December 6, 2017

So I just got into building electronics and I have a raspberry pi and I want to connect a small screen to it to make it portable. Now I don't have any money because I'm in high school and don't have a job so I took an lcd from an old camera. The camera was the Vivitar DVR 410. It has an sd card reader, Usb, Camera lens and lcd screen. Is there a way to connect the lcd to the raspberry pi? And is there anything I can use the components for? Is there a way to connect the camera module to the raspberry pi as well?

Thanks in advance

Projex · December 6, 2017

Pretty sure no. But, when you have more money to spend, you can get a screen from Amazon and connect it to a 5-volt output portable battery and maybe a case, and you're off! ( and a keyboard and mouse 2-in-1 controller thingy. Just telling you, you might need a soldering iron.

mariushm · December 6, 2017

In theory yes you could but in practice the raspberry pi is probably too slow to update the image on the display and give you high fps and you'd have to write code to get image on screen.

To explain ... that display doesn't have HDMI input or s-video input or composite, it's more basic.

The display has a very simple controller on the back which basically receives through the cable a series of bytes (8 bits at a time, or 16 bits at a time through that connector but most likely 8bits because there's too few contacts). Depending on how you initialize it, for each pixel on the LCD display you have to send either a byte (8 bits) or 2 bytes ( for 262k colors, RGB 5:6:5) or 3 bytes (RGB 24bit) so every time you want to display something on screen you have to send a lot of data one byte or two bytes at a time.

It's not HDMI, it's not s-video or composite, it's nothing as powerful and fast as those and the resolution is also small, most likely 160x120 or 320x240 or maybe best case scenario something like 480x360 or 800x600

If you're lucky, the controller on it is smart enough to tell it you want to change a pixel or start sending data from one pixel on the screen down, so you could do partial refreshes, but I doubt it.

So the PI can output image super fast using the hdmi output, but in order to display stuff on that display you would actually have to use the I/O pins and write some program to send the color information for every pixel on the screen.

The I/O pins are probably not as fast as the HDMI output, so most likely you won't have fast enough speed to display more than a few frames per second.

If you're interested to learn more, the controller on the display is probably very similar to the one used in displays like

this one : https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/newhaven-display-intl/NHD-5.7-320240WFB-CTXI-T-1/NHD-5.7-320240WFB-CTXI-T-1-ND/2165980

or this one : https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/newhaven-display-intl/NHD-5.7-320240WFB-ATXI-1/NHD-5.7-320240WFB-ATXI-1-ND/3929085

If you actually google TXDT180C-9163C you'll see that LCDs made by this manufacturer (but in other sizes) are used in various crappy phones so the Vivitar guys probably repurposed phone screen for their needs.