I found this display in this cheap chinese handheld tetris. It doesn't have any connectors on itself and is just sitting on small PCB with some kind of gum between them. What kind of display is it and how can I power it with eg. arduino?
Electronic – What type of display is this
displaylcd
Related Solutions
It's a 7-segments display. Unlike the dot-matrix character displays kevlar refers to these are most often not intelligent module. Most dot matrix displays have an HD44780-compatible controller which you simply can write ASCII codes to, but a 7-segment LCD will often be just the glass, with connections for segments and a number of backplanes (often up to 4).
Driving LCDs can be awkward since they don't use just two levels, so you can't drive them with common digital logic.
The best thing you can do is select a microcontroller with integrated LCD controller, which you can connect the display directly to, like the TI MSP430x4xx. Like most controllers this one also knows just segments; it isn't aware of digits or anything. (Great, first we had a dumb display, now we have a dumb driver as well!) There's reason for this. These LCD drivers are often used to drive custom LCDs which may be a mix of a numeric part, bar graphs and custom symbols. Such a symbol is also a single segment, so it makes no sense to talk about digits.
This display has symbols like "battery" and "alarm clock", but also all text fields, like "AM", "PM" and "SNOOZE" are symbols consisting of a single segment (i.e. controlled by a single bit).
Further reading
MSP430x4xx Family User's Guide. LCD controller is covered on p.709 ff.
As some of you as pointed out, at last I resolved myself the issues I had.
It wasn't that easy for me to find where my problem was, and since this question seemed not to be so popular I assumed nobody cared about the solution.
Sorry if some of you, trying to give me an hint, spent their time in the pursuit of find info for me.
Problem was mainly in the negative voltage this display needed to work.
Here a blog post I made about the argument, if somebody really care about it.
http://carminatialessandro.blogspot.it/2014/05/recently-i-got-into-my-hand-this-old.html
I want to express my gratitude to anyone trying to help me spent his/her time answering this question.
Best Answer
That's a simple custom LCD. The "gum" you are talking about is called a Zebra Strip and it transfers the signals from the PCB to the display. Some pressure is required for a good connection, so some sort of bracket is normally used to hold the LCD in place.
The LCD does not have an integrated display driver, it will be located on the PCB. If you really wanted to make use of this LCD, your best bet would be to hack the game itself and somehow tap into the LCD driver. To be honest, it's more trouble than it's worth.