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Recycled parts - How to get more information..?

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JamesAtCriterion:
Hello all!
One of my passions is recycling, especially now "e-waste", and I am using this to help me learn about electronics, robotics, and the like.
However, I have a question, how can I get more information about some of the parts that I am finding?

Eg: I have just pulled apart a old baby monitor, and it had a small LCD screen inside it (see attached picture), and I have tried to Google all the numbers that I can see (which are just on the ribbon cable), with no joy  :'(

I just want to know things like where to put power, what power to apply, etc.. I don't want to break it (not sure if it is even working!)

So, any ideas on how/where to find this kind of thing out?

Brumby:
Welcome!

... and welcome to our world   ;D  Sometimes trying to track this information down is enough to make you toss the thing.

You can try using a smaller group of characters than the whole string - for example: SY236 - and coupling it with other words like "LCD" or "display".   Using the full string often proves to knock out useful results as it might reference a variation for which there is no information available - but these variations can still have the same basic connectivity and operation (although this is not a guarantee) as a model which does have something on the internet.  I tried "SY236A LCD" and got some hits that suggested there are some things out there with SY236 in their identity.  I have no idea if these might be for that type of module and the few I checked out didn't yield anything.

The other thing is to do exactly what you have done - bring it here.  You never know if someone here knows about this module, perhaps having worked with them or even designed with them (Remote, but not impossible.)  If someone here can help you, count yourself lucky - but, if nothing else, you will have had confirmation that the information will unlikely be found.

One other suggestion I can offer is to try contacting the manufacturer (if you can work out who they are) and ask for a datasheet.  No guarantees there, either.

groinksan:
Did you keep the PCB to which that ribbon cable was connected? Anytime you disassemble something that has an LCD display, it is always a good idea to keep the board associated with it. Usually, there's a controller chip of some kind on the PCB that runs the LCD display. Once we can identify the controller chip, we could pull the data sheet for it, and with some reverse engineering we could at the very least figure out how the LCD display was wired, and quite possibly figure out the resolution, power rails, protocols and much more.

digsys:
and depending on who made it / what product range it came from, it can also be totally custom. Wouldn't be the first time I've found that done, often it is to save a few cents .. all counts in high production.

Stray Electron:

--- Quote from: digsys on July 14, 2019, 10:29:03 am ---and depending on who made it / what product range it came from, it can also be totally custom.

--- End quote ---

   Exactly.  Any part that you find that doesn't have a standard PN on it is probably going to be totally useless to you since you probably won't be able to get data on it.  You'll soon be overwhelmed with parts anyway so you need to learn what parts to keep and what parts to simply throw away and forget.  That said, you can learn a LOT by taking apart old equipment and reverse-engineering it's circuits.  If you want standard parts that you can reuse, you're best bet by far is some of the test equipment that is made for testing US military electronics.  A lot of it is made out of extremely high grade standard components and it usually hand built.   The hard ware (screws, etc) is usually stainless steel and they use a zillion of them. It's usually full of banana jack test points, type N connectors, etc. 

  I see that you're in NZ so I don't know what's available to you there. 

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