Hi Today we're going to take a look at vacuum fluorescent displays or VFDs We're going to have a little quick look at how they work on the whiteboard and then we're going to look at possibly getting a salvaged unit like this operational. now. This one was sent into the mailbag our segment sorry I forgot who what sent it in, but thank you very much and it is a complete vacuum fluorescent display module from a company called a Babcock here and it's a custom-designed by them. It's like a I don't know.

Count the number of characters by two lines and you've no doubt seen these vacuum fluorescent displays. They comment on audio gear and things like that incredibly common in the 70s and 80s for all sorts of year old old calculators and things like that. Used to have vacuum fluorescent displays, and they've got lots of good qualities to them there. They're really bright, so they can be used in really high ambient light environments, but you can dim them really low as well and they just look beautiful.

I Think vacuum fluorescent displays. So ah, these even is still popular even today. Although they're quite delicate and not fragile and they can age because hence the name vacuum Fluorescent Display, they are actually there is a vacuum inside there. You can see that port there that is the vacuum extraction port to suck all the air out of these things.

and they've got a glass top on them. So yeah, they are a little bit delicate. this one's had a little chip taken out of it. but I believe the vacuum inside is just fine and dandy.

So anyway, you can get these in all sorts of Salvage gear that people just toss in the dumpster and they can be really nice to actually reverse engineer them, get them up and run it again, and actually program. especially. These are dot matrix ones. They just look really good.

and this one's not only dot matrix, but it's got a ya cursor underneath as well as you can see under each one. So let's take a look at it and hopefully we can get this puppy up and working and reverse engineer this interface here. Figure out the protocol to make it talk. Let's give it a go.

Very quick explanation time here of how vacuum fluorescent displays work. If you haven't seen them before and will be able to physically see the construction of this inside the unit, I'll show you in a minute. Now what we've got here. Please excuse the crew.

Do this model didn't have time to build at the scale or to paint it. We've got three different elements here - a vacuum fluorescent display. All this stuff is inside a vacuum hence the name vacuum fluorescent Display Now on the bottom of the unit here. so this is the bottom, this is the middle and this red one is the top.

II on the bottom in blue. We've got our anode and that is a Phosphor coated element. Phosphor like your fluorescent tubes for your lights. For example, when electrons strike them, they actually fluoresce and generate light.

and that's where the light is coming from. So that's on the base of the display here. and I've shown like a 3 by 4 matrix display, but it can be a 7 segment display. Could be practically any unlimited weird shape you want.

You just shape it in whatever thing you want and it's a conductive element coded in a fluorescent material. Now on top of that, we have a grid mesh, a very fine metal mesh, and that has to be as see-through as possible. Otherwise, you won't be able to see the light coming out from the anode elements on the back here. So that's why the vacuum fluorescent displays have that sort of wire mesh II kind of look.

You know that sort of not completely solid look because you're actually looking through a metal mesh, but it's a very important aspect to it. And then on top, you've probably seen these. If you've looked at vacuum fluorescent displays, you'll typically have two wires strung from end to end. In this case, we'll see them actually run all the way over all of the individual I characters on our matrix display here.

So these are just two wires on top. and this is the cathode. And they're made of tungsten wire and they're the things that actually emit the electrons. So these things work exactly like old-school triode valves.

We've got ourselves the cathode filament here. so you're putting usually an AC voltage on that and that generates heats up and generates electrons. They burn off the surface and and they can head towards and bounce off the fluorescent material on the anode. So what we do.

I've shown these three here in the Different because they're physically constructed like this. in this case, the cathode at the top. It's going to be a negative potential compared to the Mo down here. So we put a positive voltage on here relative to our cathode filament here.

and bingo, our electrons peel off here. And if assuming that the grid is not there and doing anything, and they're attracted towards the positive anode down here. And of course, when an electron hits that fluorescent material, it glows and the entire surface of that particular element or whatever, the shape, the 7-segment display, or you know, little animal or something on there, you can have any shape you want. So when you've got a grid here like this in the middle, you put that at the same positive potential as the Mo down here and the electrons are being emitted by the cathode, can just go straight through the grid and fluoresce the anode.

But aha, if you want to turn that particular segment off ie. that dot off on your seven segment display or on your dot-matrix character display, then you just put that to the same negative potential as the cathodes, and then the election electrons are still coming off here. but they're just going to bounce back like that. They're not going to get through to the anode so the N Oh doesn't glow.

And bingo by controlling the voltage on your grid here this inner material. Then you can determine whether or not you're going to turn your your individual elements of your anodes are going to turn off or on. And what sort of voltages are we talking about here? Well, this filament here will be typically around about 4.5 volts. RMS for example, might be a typical filament supply value as so that is an AC signal there to generate the electrons.

What do we need to the anode? Well, in this positive potential Here, relative to this cathode up here, you're talking about 20 volts or there abouts maybe up to 30 volts. Maybe as low as 15, Maybe 15 to 30 is about a typical range for that. Now the voltage can actually be a bit higher here and they can be lower here for the filament drive voltage. for example, we're just talking like ballpark examples here.

And as you might suspect, the filament current here because it's just a tungsten wire, is going to be quite high current. So it's going to be responsible for the main current draw of one of these vacuum fluorescent displays. And of course, on something like a dot matrix display. Here, you're going to be driving these as a multiplex start display you're not going to drive these ecstatically with each one.

So maybe like a seven set, a single seven segment display. you might drive statically for example. But even when you got say you know ten seven segment display characters, then you pretty much go to drive a multiplex just like you would a regular LED display. But of course, the problem with the higher voltages here is that you can't drive these with your typical art TTL Logic You probably can't even drive these with 4000 series CMOS up to 15 volts for example, you might be able to get away with it I Think that some people have actually yet done that be? You pretty much need discrete high Voltage our transit ever individual transistor drivers for these things or dedicated VFD our display driver chips which you'll find typically on one of these things they won't be using discrete transistors here.

So that's the annoying part about vacuum fluorescent displays is that if you don't actually have the controller attached to it, and actually as we're going to try and do here, actually reverse engineer the controller and figure out how to drive it, then if you've just got the vacuum fluorescent display with the bare pins sticking out, then you've really got your work cut out for you. You've got to do the high voltage drivers, the Moldy place you're going to do the fill A/c filament supply and all that sort of stuff. and well, it's You can argue it's not really worth the effort. That's why we're just going to do one that's sort of like an off-the-shelf full out like controller even though we have no idea how you know.

No specs, no datasheet for it. But the good thing is is that they've got the drivers built-in Typically, they're going to be like a serial or parallel digital interface with some sort of microcontroller. Especially in the case of this one here where we've got a yellow a forty character by a two line dot-matrix character display. There's got to be some sort of microcontroller in there to drive that, so the interface should be relatively straightforward, so that's the plan.

Haven't actually tried it yet, so if I guess if it doesn't work, you might not see this video. But anyway, let's go over the bench see if we can actually get this. Get some characters on the display of this thing. So if we have a look inside this Babcock vacuum fluorescent display, we'll see exactly the same elements that we were talking about on the whiteboard.

There and there you go, you can clearly see the cathode tungsten wires going across the top. like that, you can see that they're physically on the top due to the parallax there, and you can see that they're all joined down to this metal strip here. so they're all electrically connected and also to the ones up here. They've just got three going across like that.

Very common to have our two, for example, but these are relatively high, so they've decided to put three on here. So we're obviously going to have one pin on the vacuum fluorescent display probably on the corner here if we have a spin it around. Aha, There we go. It's likely that one.

You can see some metal branching off there and then through, so that's very, very likely to be the the top part of that site cathode filament there and that is confirmed if we flip it over like this. Tada, there's that thicker trace. go in all the way with LBJ across here and down to this part of the circuit. and there we go.

That's our generator. There's our it looks like we've got ourselves a little light transformer there. Do it. Yep, so that's generating our likely AC at supply voltage for our cathode there, and the other one bingo is likely to be that corner pin there, so no surprises whatsoever.

and that would be a typical pin out on one of these vacuum fluorescent displays. Of course, you're going to have the cathode either side like this, so you can have one pin here and one pin on the other side. Pretty easy to find those and the other really interesting thing is that you can see the grid down in there really very clearly and each one is separate. You can see electrically isolated between these two characters, so these two characters on the top and bottom display are sharing the one grid there.

and if you move the display around like that, you can actually see that the grid is actually sandwiched between the anode and the cathode as we saw on the whiteboard. And then the NA driver chips are Texas Instruments Teal 48 R10 and I'll link in the datasheet down below. These are nominal 60 volt output rated I think 40 milliamps our current capability as well. So these are typical VFD our display driver chips.

They've got five of those here outside the display and hidden under the display which we can't see. There's another seven of them I Believe So on the board itself, we have the vacuum fluorescent display module which is all our socketed. Very nice. You could actually lift that out, but imagine the pin force actually required to lift that out.

geez without breaking off the break in the glass top on there. I Wouldn't like to attempt to do that, only if you're happy. You certainly wouldn't just leave it up at one end and hope it comes out. That is an absolute monster.

We've got our arm, a filament and high voltage display driver over here. We were to bodged sort of heatsink, just bent over the edge there like that. Anyway, this is designed to go into a bit of gear so it doesn't really matter. power import which we'll take a look at.

We've got those display drivers I talked about. There's another seven under there by the looks of it. so there you go. There's a whole bunch of them.

They're just done by the way. Our serial input art latched output driver chips, ten individual outputs and then we've got ourselves a processor here which is a a Babcock branded one. By the way, the date code of this board and the chips on here end of 1989. So yeah, a good 25 years old this board.

but hey, I think she's still going to work. 12 megahertz crystal. This is probably like this will not be in a Babcock custom ASIC It'll just be like a programmed micro controller from the Euro 805 one or something that equivalent. So the first thing we need to do is figure out how to power this thing.

I Did show this in the mailbag video I Did actually power it up and well, there's only one input connector here unless you count power coming through here, which I don't think so I Think it is completely power from here. It's a dead giveaway, the big pins and the big filter cap. So how do you determine the pin out on here? There's no silkscreen like this. While you look at the cap, you can see the negative of the cap.

It's the pin on this side. You can see that that trace is going over to this pin. So this pin is going to be the negative input. This pin here is going to be the positive input on the left here, so there's no input protection there at all.

And then what voltage are we going to have here? Well, it's pretty damn obvious I Don't see much in the way of regulation, although something like this could be a discrete transistor regulator. but I don't think so I think that's driving the transformer up in there. So really I think it's like going straight across the chip and what we can do is get the 5 volt. of course in we're talking like you notan on 1989 vintage chip Here nothing's going to be 3.3 volts on here.

it's all going to be 5 volt. Our logic. the micro of course is going to be at 5 volts. So it's a safe bet to say that this is a dedicated 5 Volt in.

but you could actually measure that. So our positive input their pin 40 of this micro here, which is most likely there. We go to be 5 volts and bingo it is. And then you can check the ground over here between the ground pin and bingo.

So our input here is directly across this chip. You know it's going to absolutely be 5 volts. No worries at all. So how would you pair up a board you've never are powered up before safely? Well, we go to Channel 3 here.

We've set it to what 5 volts of course and then our current limit. Ah, look. I If you wanted to be game, you'd set it to 1 amp. say? But hey, let's go point 1 amps like that.

so that'll set our common current limit. And then we can switch this sucker on. And when See that? No, it's dropped down to 5 volts. So it's hitting that hundred milliamp current limit there.

And well, you know it obviously needs more current than that. A huge vacuum fluorescent display like this is going to draw a whole lot more. So hey, switch that off and then we'll whack that back up to one amp, current limit. Switch it on.

And yeah, we've got a five Volts. it's drawing. You know, 777 milliamps there. That's a nice number.

I Like that. and Tada, let's have a look. it is flashing. Look at that.

We're going to a digit over here. Be careful of the high voltage circuitry on this side. Don't want to go pokey around there, but look, we've got ourselves a blinking cursor. so that's obviously to do that requires that this are micro actually work.

Hear that? So it powers up. It's doing something that's driving all the serial drivers doing the right thing. and you wouldn't get that if the vacuum in here was. You know it leaked out and there was no more vacuum.

So the vacuum fluorescent display is working, the micro is working, everybody's happy all now. we're going to do is figure out the interface over here. So let's take a look at this carnage connector here and it's going to either be a serial or a parallel interface. I'm not likely to be both, but look, you can see all the pins on this top side are all shorted together.

Look at that all except that one going off over there to a little jumper link. a 75e, six, whatever the hell that means. But anyway, there's a jumper link in there. Maybe we can experiment with that later, but all of those are shorted out so they're likely ground.

We can measure those, of course, before we go hooking up to the theme and look what I got here. This is our micro of course, on the bottom, and we've got one, two, three, four five, six seven, eight eight pins going off to the micro in one bus. Bingo. That's going to be an 8-bit IO port on the micro.

Absolutely no doubt about it. So and then we've got these ones here going off. that's actually a pull-up resistor network there. Oops, Better be careful fleeing this thing around, flipping it over.

You can hear the tungsten wires inside. Go. So skip, Depend on our micro there and these other ones up, they've got them. presumably pull-up resistors.

Once again, we can measure that to see where the resistor network goes there. But so, we've got one, two, three, four, four other inputs here. so it's got to be some sort of parallel interface. So there's going to be a parallel interface.

is going to be like a power 8-bit data port like this, which will no doubt take the ASCII character you would do it in ASCII just because like if I was the design engineer and they said design is a VFD module. we have an interface like this that had to hook up to something else you know and parallel. whatever. How would you do it? Well, you know the ASCII code, the 8-bit ASCII code, or seven bit 8-bit ASCII code straight on there.

Bingo. You'd most likely have some sort of that latch load line for example, something like that. You would probably have a reset line in there that reset the whole display because this micro is of course going to have the buffer inside. It's going to buffer all the characters that you are send to it and then a couple of other pins.

Yeah, I don't know what they're doing. Maybe there's some other serial interface, but no. I mean I Doubt it. I Don't know what the other pins for.

But anyway, I Think there's got to be some sort of latch low pin with an 8-bit interface. At a reset line at a minimum and a very quick check is that a pull-up or a pulldown network? It is a pull-up network. No surprises. That would have been my guess.

And I sold some pins on there. The good thing about a card edge connector? Exactly. Not point one in. So I'm some more usable headers because these are all ground pins on here.

I've actually put on three ground pins here. That's just handy. You never know when you have to attach various you know, like logic analyzer, grounds and things like that, so it's worth putting a couple more on there. Didn't want to do the whole row, but at least have more than one.

and I said before I Don't think any of those pins on the side are outputs here, but hey, just to probe them because we don't want to go injecting signals into this thing without you know, at least doing some basic checks. So of course, those data pins there. they're all going to be inputs. so I'll check the other ones as our 5 volts.

No, that's just the up pull up so it's not. No. I'm pretty damn sure it's not actually outputting that 5 volts. Otherwise, there's no reason have a pull up there.

The reason you never pull up is because it's an input. So oh, we've got a curious looking one look at that we're getting getting some frequency there. What is that? It doesn't. It's not.

It's not telling me it's not displaying that frequency. We can a see a couple that there we go. I've I see coupled the input channel here and bingo bang on 12 megahertz. Uh-huh Let's trace this sucker.

I think I know what this is Now the pin is actually on the bottom side there and it pops up through this via and you can see the trace goes around here around here snaking its way around there around the crystal and I lose it after that point but as able to buzz it out and it actually goes to pin at 39 there of this 40 pin micro so it's no surprises that we actually see 12 megahertz on here. What we're getting is just some stray capacitive coupling between that trace and because it's running right near the crystal there and obviously it's an input because if it was an output and be felt you know it would be low impedance drive on the output so it wouldn't be the just astray. capacitive coupling wouldn't be enough to get that sort of amplitude which we'll see in which was you know, 300, 400 millivolts or something like that I think it was on that pin so that one is most likely an input pin rather than an output would you believe it would have been absolutely perfect just to plug and Arduino straight onto there like that on this pin header but it's the bloody incorrect not point one millimetre pin space in there that screws it up dammit. But hey, nothing you can't fix by simply resole during those on a staggered arrangement with that pin there and there we go.

it fits on nicely. This Joss enough room there staggered wise to actually get those up pins and soldered directly. and so that's a really neat solution. Look at that.

I can just drive those digital inputs directly. All I do is hook up a ground awesome and check it out. That is the complete interface. We've got all our lines, we've got Dart this is the ground line running over here like that and we've got all of our digital lines there and we've got that extra input that we saw that had the floating line that went next to the clock.

That one's going all the way up all the way over there like that, so there's really neat and tidy. We can just plug your USB straight into there our five volt power on the main board and Wow Bob's your uncle. Well, where we go and we've figured out the reset pin on here without even doing anything. Look, I got it turned on.

There's our cursor and we haven't even got the Arduino plugged in. But look there we go. So we're resetting so it looks like that extra pin over there is like some sort of reset / blanking line something like that. and if you're curious to see what the filament supply voltage is, well, we can measure straight across that.

but be very careful when you're probing around nan ground reference circuits like this. At the moment, we don't have the Arduino hooked up to the USB here, so this is and it's hooked up to our floating Rygl supply. so it's complete in floating system relative to Mains Earth, so we can safely put our ground point on any part. Our ground clip lead of our Silla scope which is connected to Mains Earth here.

But if we once we plug in the computer here I've done a whole video on this. It's called how not to blow up your oscilloscope and this is one way to do it. When you plug in your USB on here, the ground is Mains Earth reference, most likely for through your computer unless you're completely using an isolated battery-powered laptop. So anyway, we can get in here and we can probe.

These are the two pins on our filament. There we go and the average value you can see in the bottom left-hand corner there six point, eight volts, especially recently high for A and RMS voltage. Anyway, you can. It's not a sine-wave it's just a square wave.

That's which is just fine. That's very typical. And Bingo! Look at that. I Found our flushing cursor.

You have to look through all the pins. Of course it's going to be in the physical vicinity down here. It had to be sort of on this end of the display where it's actually flashing. And sure enough, there we go.

There's our lip Lip lip. And of course it's going to be a multiplex display. So that's why we're getting the frequency there and that's being multiplexed at like a 60 Hertz or something like that. So there you go, you can see the on-off bursts like that and of course it's multiplexed in that part down in there.

and then it's just completely switched off down in that part. So there you go. And of course, by adjusting the duty cycle and the frequency in there, you can adjust the brightness of the display. Oh, and I Forgot to mention the voltage.

We're at 20 volts per division here, so this is a particularly high voltage board. so it's like 40. Look at that? like 45 volts or thereabout. So yeah, pretty high By the way.

I Just wanted to mention even if you couldn't figure out like the proto, the interface protocol to this micro or anything like that, I mean not as long as your work out it, you should be able to get it, but let's assume you can't. Hey, you can just suck that thing out. And as I said, these are just serial input VFD drivers. So we have the data on these.

We've got the pin outs. We can just figure out where the input chain is - the serial thing and just drive them directly with our own micro or with our Arduino or whatever you want to use. So you know you don't really have to reverse engineer this if you don't want to. Now check it out.

This is my first shot at an Arduino sketch here and I've just start. Basically put the letter H on the data line here and I haven't even got in there and set all the pins but by default because that pull-up resistor on there, those are what I think are those for our control lines. I've only done a pin number one on the Arduino there. I've just said it low four times ever even.

I just uploaded it and look what? I got tada I got lucky. look um, it looks like that pin one is some sort of test pin or something. Obviously when you pull it low when I first hooked up, the Arduino powered it on it, didn't do anything. all I got was the cursor because that pin was being pulled high by that resistor network there.

But obviously when I pulled that pin one low, look, it's going into a test sequence where it just writes all the characters. so that's not my Arduino sketch doing that. that's the building processor in there actually got a test routine. So Bingo! I found what one of the pins does.

pin one on my ID when I got to figure out which pin on there. But anyway, that is the test pin. Awesome! Sometimes you get lucky like that. In fact, in fact, that probably should have been what it sort of was going to be.

My first step is to actually just start toggle each one of those pins low and high. but I just download the sketch to make sure the Arduino worked and it was all hooked up to my Arduino and bang. I Got lucky Beauty So what I'll do is I'll just change that here from low to high and I'll recompile. redownload that and we should see that actually stopped and bingo.

Yep, it stopped and now it's it's doing Louie look every yeah, it was doing something funny. the X the Arduino is pulsing, a little lines, etc. etc. So, but look, it's actually stopped.

Updating that now. and if I put that back low. this is a crude way to do it. Of course you could, you know, have buttons or do, do whatever.

but let's just download that again. And the it's downloading the sketch, doing silly stuff. see it, pulsate in there and Bingo! We're back to the scroll in test mode. Awesome where it prints out all the ASCII characters embedded in that thing.

Fantastic! So processor is definitely working as we suspected. weird wood Of course. we got the cursor there and it's printing out The entire character said absolutely brilliant see: I Wouldn't have immediately guessed that one of those was a test line. It's You know it's something that the designer may or may not have included.

It's not something that you'd first guess, but sure enough, it's hey. the designer was thinking I need to test these things in production of course. So hey, what do you do? Have a pin? Just strap it low on there to test the modules in production. of course, a test routine like that built-in but yet we found it.

No worries, it's pin number one on the Arduino Whatever it goes to now, I'll go in and not toggle the other pins and see what happens. And like I said, I expect another line to be, say a data latch line or something like that. So it's not latching any data at the moment, it's just toggling that one pin. Bingo! Check it out! I'm starting to right there and what? I did there as I just started out like each pin I just start toggled low for a hundred milliseconds there and I finally got to the point where, well, pin three on the Arduino that's the thing that actually latched in the individual data.

so I should be able to get this to display anything I still don't know about the other pins I was just sort of randomly I tried setting them high first so I had all of the all of the control lines high and then I was totally in each one low and that didn't seem to work. but it seems that if I keep them low, they're all of them low. and then toggle pin three high. Bingo! That's the down latch pin.

Just as I expected. and of course, I'm only putting in a H at the moment. and yes, it is an ASCII character because I put in at the top of the Arduino sketch. I put in the binary representation on the data port pins over here for the uppercase H So which is Us 72 decimal I think it is.

So there you go. I should be now able to just produce any text I want on the screen. so I know what the reset pin is. We figured that out before we even hooked up the Arduino.

We now know what the test pin is. We now know what the latch pin is. still going to figure out what the other ones are, but each time you enter in a data, it just shifts the character to the next location. That's pretty much how I expected that something like this to work.

It could be a really dumb display. like there may be no like a control thing as I said where you can actually set the cursor location I Don't know. but at least I've got it up and running so I can clear the screen and display text. That's the main thing that's basically working.

And of course you don't need an Arduino to experiment like this. I could have just start wired on some dip switches or some table switches on to a panel and then just you know, toggle all the switches until I until I got it to do something. You know. So and it, whatever floats your boat.

And of course I was writing data to it very slowly before and by default I was pulsing the latch line like for a hundred milliseconds as I said, like you start off really slow like that because you don't know on these unknown systems that you're trying to debug, how fast or how capable they are I've actually processing those as I suspected an input latch. So you start out something really slow. you know, like a hundred milliseconds something like that. Now I've dropped it down to ten milliseconds and it's still latching the data just fine.

You can push it and push it and push it until you find the limits if you want to. Actually, you know, push the speed limits of updating this thing. but there it's just a display. It doesn't matter, but that is relevant to other things you try to debug though.

And by the way, I still haven't figured out whether or not it's actually a load of high transition of that pin or hide a low I Haven't figured out the polarity after you know, play around with the code on a one-off basis to see when it actually updates, but yet that's no problem. And of course, they just happen to guess the correct order of the bits like a for the data bus. So what? which was the least significant bit which was the most significant bit used a bit of intuition there in that it would be in a certain direction based on the layout and stuff like that. if I actually figured out exactly what that chip is and you could have got it to be on an 8-bit data bus port.

most likely you can figure out that way. But yeah, I mean it would have been fairly obvious if I started writing in data in there which was sort of, you know, garbage but the same each time then I would have flipped the bits and and figured it out that way so it's not too hard. I got relatively lucky based on an educated guess. and how do I know if I've got the polarity of that clock.

Penal Wrong. Well I've written my out little string parsing routine here and I'll restart this thing and you'll see that here we go. Tada. it's missing the H at the front so obviously the bits aren't toggled correctly.

so I've to get that first byte so it's fine to that. So yeah, I obviously got that clock pin. it's not active low. it looks like it clocks the data in on active high.

So I've changed that around and bingo there it is. Hello World Hacked by the Eevblog. We got our H right at the start so that's how I knew I had those bits on the edge there back to front. No worries.

So there you go. I'm pretty happy with this that yet. We basically hacked this thing and easily figured out the well, it's some simple protocol here was just a parallel data input latched as I suspected. it could have been much trickier than that, but hey, you know I I put the odds at like you know, 80 90 percent pretty high that that's what it was going to be.

Why? Because that's how I would have designed it now. I've had a bit of a play around with the other control pins on here and I can't really get it to do anything obvious. try it or various combinations and well, yeah, I don't think I want to spend too much time on it at the moment. Maybe if I had a really good use for this thing that I'd actually pursue that and figure out exactly what those are pins do.

They may do nothing, it may just have that simple ability to what reset the cursor like that and just start wrap from the fortieth character over to the 41st and that's it. So you know you could try and you know, debug this thing until the cows come home to figure out what those extra pins do and they may do well and truly nothing. So anyway, I've got it to a usable point because you can always print a string of up 40 characters there. Even if you want, you know just something here and then something here or something in the middle.

You can just do that in software. So as it stands, it's completely hacked. Completely usable. So I'm very happy with that.

So I'll leave it at that. So I hope you enjoyed that little reverse engineering slash hack video of getting a VFD up and running. Anyway, the video has been much longer than I intended. so there you go.

I will on too much I am the waffle master but anyway, if you liked that, please give it a big thumbs up because that helps a lot. And if you want to discuss it, jumping over the eevblog foreign live YouTube Comments: Leave Eevblog comm comments. All that sort of stuff catch you next time you you.