After checking out this question about a visual side effect caused by separation of each pixel into subpixels (red, green and blue), I thought that there might be a way to unite the subpixels into whole pixels using square matte filters. Various displays are built in a way that makes the formations of subpixels non-square, or even different size of subpixels, and subsequently their count, so I'm not sure if it could work with those (unless they'd have some odd shape). Is there any such thing on the market?
Electronic – display technology that unites red, green and blue subpixels into a single pixel
display
Related Solutions
Many digital panel meter modules will work at 5 V power supply, and probably won't take much power, so that you might draw that from the thermostat.
But these are no good. They will measure voltage, but don't take the non-linear characteristic nor the offset into account. You'll need a microcontroller to convert the voltage input to a temperature reading which then can be displayed.
Most microcontrollers have ADCs (Analog-to-Digital Converters) to read the analog voltage of the thermistor, and convert it to a digital value the controller can work with. You'll need to know the characteristic of the thermistor and its series resistor to know which voltage agrees with which temperature. You can use a mathematical formula for that, or a lookup table.
If you use a microcontroller with an on-chip LCD driver you can directly connect a display like this one, and you won't need anything else; just the microcontroller and the display. TI's MSP430 controllers are very low power, and so is the display, so you'll be able to run it of the thermostat's power supply.
Why do I need lightboost(Or any other 3-D vision product)?
You do not need Lightboost or any other 3D product to display 3D content that is visible with shutter glasses.
You can just send alternating right and left fields and as long as you have a way to sync the shutters in the glasses to the corresponding fields, the user will see 3D. (Assuming you do it fast enough!)
Back in the good-old days, we would use the vertical retrace time to alternate the fields by just redrawing the bit-mapped graphics screen. We would send a signal out the audio jack to control the LCD shutters and sync the glasses. Ugly, but it worked!
Heck, the (amazing!) Vectrex displayed stereo 3D images by using a spinning disk with a slot in it. There was a little sensor in the glasses that told the display when the slot was going to be over each eye, and the CPU would then draw the next field just in time for the slot to reveal it.
(It was actually so much cooler than this simplified explanation! It could even do color on a monochrome screen because there were alternating colored filters over the slot in the spinning wheel. One of the greatest hacks I've ever seen!).
What lightboost(3-D stereo feature of it) actually does?
Lightboost is a clever idea to make 3D content viewed though shutter glasses look brighter. Normally when you look at a monitor without glasses, both of your eyes are open and collecting light all the time.
When you use 3D shutter glasses, the shutters alternate opening and closing. No light gets to either eye when both shutters are closed, so any light the monitor produces during this time is wasted. The more time both shutters are closed, the dimmer the display looks to your eyes.
So why not just have the one shutter open at exactly the moment the other closes so there is never a moment when both are closed? While this is the ideal goal, in real life shutters do not open and close instantly and screens to do update instantly. As you reduce the time when both shutters are closed between fields, at some point each eye starts to see images meant for the other eye or intermediate images. This usually looks like blurring.
With Lightboost, the back-light in the monitor actually turns off between fields. You can not see what is on the screen when the back-light is off, so as long as there is a full-formed image on the monitor and one shutter is completely open and the other is completely closed at the moment the back-light strobes, there will not be any blurring visible no matter how long the shutters stay open.
I think Lightboost also takes advantage of the fact that you can run the back-light at a higher brightness for a short duration than you could run it at continuously.
The net effect is that more light gets from the monitor to your eyes with Lightboost, so the image looks brighter.
Why don't we just use the same communication with monitor and simply send preconstructed Left and Right pixel datas to the monitor and then it decodes the data and do the same job as in lightboost?
You could just send pixel data, but to get Lightboost to pulse exactly when your shutter is open you will need to replicate the protocol, which is non-trivial.
Best Answer
It would be possible to design a display with diffusing elements, each of which could receive illumination from three light sources. It would be difficult, however, to have a diffusing element which would not send any light back toward its origin (wasting brightness), nor reflect any light that came from outside back toward the outside (creating an inferior "black level" or causing glare). Additionally, is generally both easier and more effective to design all lights to have parallel light-vs-angle distributions than to try to aim each light toward the center of its pixel. If lights are aimed toward the centers of their pixels, it will be necessary to either design the diffusers to counteract that effect or else tolerate significant color shifts with viewing angle.
For all of those reasons, even if it would be conceptually "nicer" for a 640x480 display to contain a 640x480 grid of three-color pixels than to have a 1920x480 grid where each pixel is red, green, or blue, the latter design offers substantial advantages which outweigh the fact that physical pixels don't quite match the logical definition.