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ไทย : English

....................Hello all Overclockzone Pals, I am a new writer here. Nice to meet you. It's holiday today so I just want to play something strange. Ready ? Then let's see what I have today.

I would like to present How to make a multipurpose LCD screen. The LCD screen can do many things, such as, displaying the CPU speed, rotary speed of the fan, CPU heat (if the mainboard supports this feature), a clock, E-mail, displaying a song's name in Winamp, and many other things. So what are we waiting for? Let's have a look.

First of all, we need to prepare some equipment as shown in the pictures which consists of a soldering iron, leads, a lead suction, pliers, a screw driver, and the most important thing is the LCD Screen, size 20 x 4. You may be amused why it has to be 20 x 4, not 20 x 5 so it's equal to 100. No, it's not like that. The ‘20' refers to numbers of alphabets per one line, and there are 4 lines in total. So, it's not necessary that the LCD screen has to be 20 x 4, it can be 16 x 2 too. By the way, the 20 x 4 is rather expensive and pretty hard to find for the second hand. The 16 x 2 can be found in Ban Moh which cost around 200 – 300 baht. The screen uses HD44780 control label, you can ask the seller, but don't try to look at the IC numbers which is behind the screen because sometimes the IC numbers are not HD44780, but still use as same instruction as HD44780. I got the 20 x 4 LCD screen from purchasing on the Internet. There is a website; www.es.co.th , where I bought the LCD from. This website belongs to ElectricSource Shop in Ban Moh, you may know it. I got this LCD for 900bht+ or you can search for BC2004AGPLEH through the website. This model has back light which makes us able to see the letters even though it's dark. Last thing is the printer cable. You can use an old one, but do not use the one that is the USB port nor the SCSI. You just can't! He he he.!!

This picture is just a board. However, we should understand the board first. I would start from the side of LCD as the first one.

The 1 st line of the LCD connected with the 18 th – 25 th line which are the Ground.
The 2 nd line of the LCD connected with 5 voltages current
The 3 rd line of the LCD connected with the ground which is the
photo controller. I will just pass the electricity straight away through the ground, because I don't want to have only one level for the light depth.
The 4 th line of the LCD connected with the 16 th line of the printer cable.
The 5 th line of the LCD connected with the 14 th line of the printer cable.
The 6 th line of the LCD connected with the 1 st line of the printer cable.
The 7 th line of the LCD connected with the 2 nd line of the printer cable.
The 8 th line of the LCD connected with the 3 rd line of the printer cable.
The 9 th line of the LCD connected with the 4 th line of the printer cable.
The 10 th line of the LCD connected with the 5 th line of the printer cable
The 11 th line of the LCD connected with the 6 th line of the printer cable.
The 12 th line of the LCD connected with the 7 th line of the printer cable.
The 13 th line of the LCD connected with the 8 th line of the printer cable.
The 14 th line of the LCD connected with the 9 th line of the printer cable.
The 15 th line of the LCD connected with the +5 voltages current which feed the back light of the screen.
The 16 th line of the LCD connected with the positive current and the ground. This is the ground of the back light.

Here is the feature of front site of the LCD screen.

You might notice that there is no any numbers at the IC, but the instruction that the screen uses is the same instruction as the screen which use HD44780 as a controller.

First step, we gotta try to crack the printer cable. It needs a screw driver because it is pretty hard! Well, just try and take both ends off because we are going to solder both sides.

After open it, it become naked! (Wow!)

We will solder the side with printer cable first. (The line connected with printer has 36 bars, another side which would connect with the computer has 25 bars). Actually we can just cut it off, but if we cut it off we have to crack many more wire. I don't want to crack the new wires, had better solder them.

Now, we will apply the lead on the LCD screen. It is very easy to do the solder on the screen and apply all 16 bars. Just take you time but don't spend lots of time on each bar because the copper flake will fall out. Plus, the heat at the soldering iron should not be more than 30 Watts. Otherwise, it would be dangerous.

To solder the wire, I would start from the sixth line of the LCD, because it connects with the first line of the printer port. We will solder from the sixth line to the fourteenth line (9 lines in total). The 1 st – 5 th line is for controlling all system of the LCD, and the 15 – 16 th line is for the back light.

After finish all those 9 lines, now you can take a breath because the smell is really bad. Then continue soldering the 1 st – 5 th line to the printer cable.

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