controllerlcdtft
I have been using LCD screens (with the controllers) for my projects for a long time. Now I thought of learning how these screens actually work, the part before they go to the controllers.
Well the idea came to my mind when I managed to scavenge an old working screen out of my old tablet. It has 60 pins and I managed to find a datasheet for it. The model number is: AU OPTRONICS A080SN03 (datasheet here).
What does each pin of a 60 pin TFT display do? And how can I use it?
It's very possible that you'll never find a datasheet. Reverse engineering may be your best option for understanding what you have.
I recommend that, rather than dissecting a dead one - study a live one.
I would work from the bottom up. First find the LCD lines, look for meaningful signals. Use a logic analyser or oscilloscope to determine the type of bus and the shape of a transaction.
For example, for SPI you'd see a chip select, a square wave clock and two data lines. For RGB video, you might see three analogue ouputs with luma components. Or, for CVBS/Composite you might observe a colourburst.
Once you can take some action on the original device and predict the signals to the LCD, you can clone it.
Build a software implementation on your microcontroller to output the same patterns. Observe that it drives the LCD in the same way.
Alter the behaviour of your software driver repeatedly in small meaningful ways to discover how inputs relate to outputs. Try to determine the effect of flipping bits in the data and the effects they have, use this to guess at the data format.
The INT057ATFT uses an SSD1961 controller, whose I/O can be configured in Motorola 6800 mode or Intel 8080 mode. So if your microcontroller has an 8080 type interface you can connect it without problems. But also a microcontroller without external address or data bus can talk to the LCD controller, of course.
The left side connections are the only ones you should look at. The ones on the right are the controller's business; you don't have to worry about those. That's very different from the TM056KDH01 you refer to in a comment. That's an LCD controller which needs continuous data, combined with vertical and horizontal sync. You can compare it somewhat with video + sync: if you stop supplying a video signal you won't have a picture. Only here you have 18 digital lines instead of one analog. The SSD1961's microcontroller interface runs asynchronous of the LCD refresh. You just have to fill the buffer.
There are a couple of control lines, like D/C (Data/Control) select, R/W and enable, which will be familiar for users who have worked with text LCD modules with a 44780 controller. The SSD1961 datasheet has a list of commands you can use to configure the LCD. You supply the commands via the 18-bit data bus. That allows to send a complete pixel data of 3 x 6 bit (RGB) simultaneously. An 8080 microcontroller only has an 8 bit bus, and you can configure the device to use only 8-bit; the unused data lines should remain floating. In 8-bit mode you need less I/O pins on you microcontroller, but each pixel will need three successive writes.
Best Answer
The datasheet seems pretty thorough, and the core functionality looks pretty straightforward. Once everything is set up, you clock in RGB values one pixel at a time. First you go across a row, then down a column.The relevant control signals are:
So the basic flow will be (from the start of the first row)
There are lots of timing constraints on these steps. Section 5 has the specs for those.
There are some other control signals, voltage references, and a serial interface. I'm not sure what the serial interface is for, but I didn't look very thoroughly. None of them looks terribly complicated.
All that being said, using this LCD will be very difficult. This is a complex mixed-signal system. Plus, as described in section 4a, you need six separate voltage supplies. There are some example schematics for switching regulators in section G, but each of those is a project in itself.
Studying the datasheet could be very educational, but I don't recommend this as a project for a beginner.