Nope, I'm in IT. Mate next door is a boilermaker though. But I did build a 2 x story kids cubby house in the back yard out of cross-braced 1" RHS - half the lower level is my lawn locker too. That was fun.

This was the first time I'd ever used my Dremel in anger - I must say it has paid for itself and doubled it's money in one sitting. Awesome piece of kit, I wish I'd had one sooner. It was purchased for, and will be seeing action later, on some Mirror Indicators I'm planning on putting into my BA scalps.... (exterior-modifications-f15/au-ba-bf-mirror-indicators-t74979.html)

I hacked the back off the case today. Results were fantastic - enough for me to start fabricating the mount plate in earnest now.


Lukeyson

 

 

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Heya Luke, no time no speak

I've been playing with the factory LCD since starting with my Carputer, and have a spare working controller board here, which I could reverse engineer and play with.

There are a couple controller chips:

1) Main RGB chip, which is a Sharp IR3Y26A
2)Overlay controller, MB90096

The LCD is a 400xRGBx234 TFT unit, meaning you will need to provide 800x468 resolution to drive it proper, and get the best results. The controller board has an onboard inverter, as well as R,G, B and Common outputs to drive, well, it seems, an VGA (RGB) monitor - without having a full datasheet on the IR3Y26A, it is difficult to tell though.

I have an older NEC 320x200 LCD here to have a play with, so I will see if I can set the resolution to suit that LCD, and also check if it was a 5V panel, which seems this is what the Sharp chip is driving.

The crappy text resolution is why I went for a Transflective NEC NL8060B21-03 8.4" LCD, very crisp, and gets better in direct sunlight too.

Interesting project you're busy with, I decided on the Commell LS-372 3.5" motherboard, with a Core-2-Duo T7100 (1.80gig) cpu, 2gigs of ram, and a OCZ Apex 60gig SSD.

From power-on, to windows desktop is 21seconds....fast bootup was a major priority for me, as well as having ample processing power. This unit is very small, physically same size as a 3.5" harddrive, and Synrax Australia stocks them. Fairly exxy, but well worth the price - the newer LS-373 is virtually the same, with mini-pci express vs mini pci slot. Chipset is the nice Intel 965GME.

Herewith a few datasheets that might help Matt - I guess if we can find out what max resolution the IR3Y26A can drive, we might have a chance - seems retrofitting std 800x480 7" LCDs should work fine with the info that we have.

Looking forward hearing from you.

 

 

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mb90096_onscreen_display_controller_lcd_datasheet.pdf [398.54 KiB] Downloaded 541 times

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@ Lukeyson - show auMatt this, he might be happy

Was difficult to get, but, here is the IR3Y26A datasheet - have a look at page 25 for a typical application circuit:

Pins:
4 -> Common out
29 -> R out
33 -> G out
35 -> B out
48 -> Sync out

 

 

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Real_IR3Y26A_datasheet.pdf [1022.48 KiB] Downloaded 482 times

Nice sleuthing mrbean. You've dug up some good info.

I sort of stopped playing with this spare controller once I got the NEC transflective display, much better than anything else in direct sunlight. The Display can be driven directly via LVDS from my Commell motherboard, but I opted to get a Digital View ALR-1400 controller instead, it seems the Genesis controller chip on the ALR also have video overlay capabilities - you see where I'm going with this? Hehe. So much to do, so little time.

Great work on the paddle-shifter btw, I think you can put my name down for one - you going to roll this out, d_m? Been following your development with great anticipation.....

Cheers, yes I'm going to be making/selling them. I'm currently waiting on my first prototype PCBs (x2) to come back from manufacturing. Once I'm happy with them, I'll get a batch made up.

There's also a Serial eeProm in the Display Controller as well - I think close to identical to the chip in the Instrument Cluster. We've been wondering what it does for ages, and now I suspect it is feeding data to the Overlay controller somehow, or else it contains the data for the test screens.

Is it worthwhile firing up a new thread for reverse engineering the ICC? I made a few little extra discoveries with the ICC the other day too - I managed to locate the OBD2 commands to generate the test display modes. Pics are at the end of the BA Scantool Fun thread.


Lukeyson

Hello Luke,
Yes, I saw the serial eeprom - it might contain the test-screen data as per your other thread - great discovery btw

It might be worthwhile starting a reverse-engineering thread of the ICC and/or LCD controller - I need to start going on a little pet-project to eventually replace the ICC with a microcontroller, and utilize the existing space for a big carputer touchpanel, maybe 15" in portrait mode.

Acres of wasted space.......wich Ford would stick to standalone double-din stereo systems......damn.

edit: Added serial eprom datasheet.

edit2: There's also a 2134SL microcontroller, and in hindsight, I guess this microcontroller, with the serial eprom will be controlling the graphics for the overlay. In essence, there are 2 "seperate" graphical controllers on this controller board, one for the main graphics, being simply a passthrough from the external source, such as satnav or carputer, and then the internal controller, handling the CAN-data from the ICC, and using the 2134SL micro/eeprom/overlay controller to display to the TFT.

All conjecture on my part, but I think pretty accurate anyway.

I purchased a very nice little AVR CAN-controller kit from Dontronics, with the eye on engineering a hardware replacement for the complete ICC, and I think it is pretty do-able - see the AVR-kit datasheet....as well as the usb-jtag programmer.

So, is this the case that I'm all dressed with nowhere to go

Hehe....

 

 

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Oh yeah, if that won't get you over the brink, herewith a simple CAN bootloader application for the aforementioned AVR kit

Comeon Luke/data_mine, you know you want to..... :rofl:

 

 

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Slim_CAN_bootloader-rev-1.0.0.pdf [249.55 KiB] Downloaded 425 times

Now if you can find the Ford logo 'boot' screen, and replace it with a FPV logo, you'll have FPV owners beating down your door.

Add infinitum, for XR logos, custom whatevers.

Even though it's a eeprom, is it externally programmable? That'd be great.

Well, I have this...sort of...herewith an idea what my logo looks like on my CentraFuse frontend

Soz for the off-topic, Lukeyson, will reign myself in and wonder back on-topic....

 

 

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FPV logo is banned from my car. Only Ford or XR are allowed in....

I don't think there's enough space in that eeprom to map out a whole image - most of that stuff would be programmed in VRAM on the overlay chip itself. But with the night/day mode I wonder if there's a colour map of some sort?

With that negativity on the table, you never really know until you get into it do you - because if you can get to the VRAM, I suspect there'd be people wanting more things than just adding the FPV boot logo. The Clock on current SY Tory's is something a lot of people have been asking for too. But then what other dependencies are there on turning the clock on? Given the control over the clock from the menu, I suspect the clock itself would have to be in the main controller unit itself as well as the overlay unit.


Lukeyson

There's a thread over on FordForums about it, and I got a few peoples hopes up with this chop.

You're a naughty man, Data_mine You had me there for a moment....

Oh, and just to go off topic for a bit, my M2-ATX power supply has apparently been held up in customs.

Pfft. I should have bought that clone off eBay....


Lukeyson