Red Backlit 2x20 LCD

[Flying Panther]

Since the dutch section of the forum doesn't show much activity, I might as well try it here :)

I want to implement a red backlit LCD (2x20) in my MB SID. I was very happy when I found one at crystalfontz.com, but I was less excited when I've had a look at the shipping costs to the Netherlands. Shipping would be about 40 USD, and since the LCD itself costs about 27 USD, I'd like to know if there are other retailers (in europe) who sell the same kind of LCD. I've searched a lot, but without success, I only found redirections to crystalfontz :(

[Wilba]

You might want to try local suppliers of Winstar LCDs... judging from the part numbers and datasheets, Crystalfontz just sells LCDs made by Winstar.

[Flying Panther]

Thankyou! :D They are indeed Winstar LCD's I think. I found a dutch firm that imports Winstar products, now let's see if they can deliver the lcd I want ;)

[Sasha]

Panther, I`ve been hunting red LCD for my MBSID without success. Same problem as you have. I just find and contact Wintsar company about distributors and waiting for an answer. Thanks Wilba.

I find this page: http://ouwehand.net/~peter/lcd/lcd_md.shtml but none of the distributors have working website, except Italy but their English part of website isn`t English at all.

Panther, will you please inform us about buying the display you need in europe?

I am also interested in any unconventional (non-blue) LCD - negative, white, red... so if someone knows ehere in Europe to buy one I`ll appreciate it.

[Flying Panther]

I haven't come to calling the dutch distributor yet, but I'll post here when I do :)

I found a page with official european distributors that you may find usefull: http://www.winstar.com.tw/Archive/about_us/distributor_Europe.html

[TheAncientOne]

Thanks Pather: one of their distributers is about 20 min from where I live. I'll ring them next week.

If I can source a 20x2 red backlit LCD, who else is interested?

I would like a 16x2 red negative to go in my P3, I'm trying for a sort of aircraft instrumentation look, grey panel, white lettering, and green/red displays. I notice that some eastern bloc military aircraft use blue panels: has anyone any feedback on the best low light visibility? I kind of thought that if anyone has got the art of designing ergonomic panels that can be read easily by stressed people, then the aviation industry must be my best bet for examples.

Mike

[stryd_one]

OK now we're in my field - military aircraft  ;D If you want the juice on this stuff, there are communities online who do DIY cockpits for flight sims and they're the mega gurus... But I'll do what I can... I'll try to keep it brief for now cause I could go on for ages...

First: A question - Define Low Light Visibility :) Tell me a bit about the application, the layout of this instruments, other instruments you might want to work with, etc... Unless you're in bright white light, the best visibility is always a f'n bright white light  ;D See how his smile stands out?

Now: a ramble....

As for fatigue you can break it down pretty easy: Blue/Yellow is bad, Red/Green is good.

Bright blue is most fatiguing and f*@$ your night vision, so if you look at your blue P3 you might have trouble looking at the green LCD on your MBSID or whatever afterwards... Anyone who's ever stared into an HR824's power LED knows what I mean. Ouch. Blind. Yellow is similar, but not to such an extent. Really old aircraft had a dim yellowy-orange or red filtered light on nearly everything, but then they were the only thing available ;) Yellow is in a safe area of the spectrum, but it's also a very small area of the spectrum, so you need a lot of it, and our eyes are sensitive to it..

Red and to a lesser extent green won't screw your night vision, and IIRC green is less visible from a distance at night or something (irrelevant) and I think it gives better depth perception and edge recognition and is less fatiguing than red... Green is not all that friendly to your night vision... if it is very dim it's not bad, but at medium to high brightness it is not so hot. In a club or something or if a PC video monitor is there, there's little point in this, of course.

As far as keeping it visible, contrast is gonna be the trick.

Current mil and commercial stuff is all luminescent which might be the 'white' lettering on grey you've seen... it's actually that creamy 'glow in the dark'  colour :) The end result at night is that the panel is just 'not there', and all the important stuff glows. (That 'important stuff' always feels like 'not enough stuff' when you're on instruments at night...it's like...WTF did everything go? hehehe) But it costs a freaking bomb of course. Just a sideline note, actual panel labelling has been pretty much phased out in all new designs, everything goes on backlit switches and LCD/touchscreens now. $40 a switch, not likely for me ;)

As for the blue panelled MiGs, I have no idea what those crazy ruskies are up to, but I suspect (due to the bright blue colour) that it's a contrast thing again, designed to help you single out the instruments in daylight, and then disappear in the dark. Some older western aircraft have had relatively bright colours inbetween the instruments as well.. I've been in a caribou with sky blue like that... But the instruments in that panel are still black with luminescent labeling.

As far as older designs go, naval greenrooms use a white/cream/light grey panel with black lettering, and aircraft use black with white; the areas are lit in green and red respectively.

As well as colour, texture is pretty important. I'm all about a matte finish, especially on the panel itself, because it stops reflections blinding you. It's a bitch to find in switches and knobs of course ;)

So yeh... You have to think about the colour of the environmental lighting, colours and textures of other gear, how much lighting is on your gear, if the CS lighting/control position is advantageous (IE LED's behind the line of sight to the knob will highlight the knob), is there a big shiny bright blue LED lit synth next to it, is there a PC screen there, ... blah blah blah...

I'll see what you have to say and then give you some more direct advice (as opposed to random info) if you like... Meantime you might like to visit http://www.dscc.dla.mil/ it's a milspec library. Not light reading, it's downright unpleasant, but informative

This graph of our colour sensitivity gives a hint of why all the night vis stuff is like it is:

The dashed line is our monochrome night vis.

Wikipedia has some goods on this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cone_cell

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_cell

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visible_light#Spectral_colors

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purkinje_effect  <--- I didn't know it had a name! hehehehe Recommended reading!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contrast_(vision)

I think I might have to split this topic too hahahaha

[TheAncientOne]

Thankyou so much for this - a hell of a lot of work, and most appreciated. I know most modern cockpits are glass and (horror) have soft keys and virtually no labelling. I thought of the look I've seen in some MIL kit I've worked with, as well as the Boeing cockpit I looked at a while ago, more neutral grey than black.

The blue display is for my MIDIbox monitor - just because I found a nice Hammond transparent blue box, and I won't have to cut a hole or make a bezel.

P3 will have a green or, if I can sort it, a red display. I've got Re-An soft textured knobs in black/white and black/grey, and charcoal Cherry buttons with clip tops for labelling. I had initially planned to have a back engraved plastic panel done, but was worried about reflections, so now I'm not sure. I will be experimenting with edge lit panels, I saw some Korean war era panels that were black screened perspex, with white lettering, and embedded lamps, not that bright, but good low light visibility. I may have to go for some other LED's, Colin used red/green dual colour LED's, but snce I have a bit of red/green colour blindness I might replace them with a red and a green row - getting a spatial indication as well as a colour one. (Sorry to TK for heretically discussing a non-MIDIbox sequencer, I just got lucky with one of the last sets of PCB's).

Initially I know I won't get the surfaces right, and have planned for a re-work, doing my own metalwork for the first lot. Eventually I want a rig with a consistent look, that is easy and intuitive to  operate. I figure the military have done the most work in this area, and I should follow their lead.

I'm looking forwards to the day when some reasonable big LCD graphics panels come cheap, then, using CAN, we could have a programmable MIDIbox panel, perhaps using a mixture of buttons and switchable encoders around the edge, which could be used as a standard CS, and user customized at the graphics level

The end result will be  for the future: my eyesight is failing, (I've only had one fully functional eye since being a kid, and now the other one is starting to go). I can solder well enough, still, with decent light and a magnifier, but later it's going to get worse, and I want to be able to use the stuff easily later on. I've been looking at big displays too!

I'm doing some valve/retro audio stuff too, based on the Gyraf DIY stuff - I think I've seen you there too. For that gear I've sourced some of the cream Traffolyte that engraves to dark brown, and found some very good quality old bakelite knobs, so should look like some old Solartron gear from the 60's - which is a bit in line with the Navy look you mention. Sitting in a box I found two SEW VU meters, the clear square ones with a cream face, bought for a mixer I did at school, and never used, so they finally get to  live a little on my compressors!

Some analogue synth stuff really winds me up: random piles of knobs and jacks that get in each others way, (some Plan9 stuff would be almost unusable fully patched), and a design aesthetic based on  a high quality version of the Moog Modular. EMS stuff was so far ahead of it's era, just a pity the electronics of the day weren't quite up to it. Did you ever see a Spectre - a video synth in the 70's? One of the things that I find most attractive about the MIDIbox community is the diversity and quality of design.

On another track, some Tektronix and Agilent gear is beautiful, though the older HP stuff often beats the recent, I used to love the look of Neve and SSL desks, and have felt like throwing rocks at one or two other console designers!

Thansk again for the lighting stuff, very interesting.

Best wishes

Mike

[stryd_one]

Ahh lots of stuff there to chat about :)

Before I get stuck into it, do you know more about the cause of your colour blindness? The best solution will depend on which type you got...

Who'd have thought that DIY audio would involve such things as adaptations accounting for colourblindness in low light situations  ;D

BTW... I think the M1 Abrams would probably be a good thing to model from... I'll grab some pics for ya..

Edit: I think this pic says it all:

[dj3nk]

hey, you've stolen my SIDs cs ;)

[stryd_one]

Only if your SID looks like this:

MMMM..... Resonance...

  ;D

[TheAncientOne]

Told him not to use a cheap switchmode.....

Seriously, the military consoles look very cool, all the more surprising when you consider that ergonomics are everything and there's not a stylist in sight. I need to get down to Bovington and take a look at the Challenger 2. I hadn't even thought of tanks - last ones I had anything to do with were strictly old school.

I would love to do a CS like that - it could have envelope graphics, waveform  displays, the lot. Though I think my entire studio will be equipped for less than the display module cost in the picture.

Like the cute robot said "Input! Input!"

Thanks again

Mike

[stryd_one]

Told him not to use a cheap switchmode.....

LOL

Seriously, the military consoles look very cool, all the more surprising when you consider that ergonomics are everything and there's not a stylist in sight.

Yeh a friend of mine who is a fashion designer and I were having a chat a few weeks back about the inherent beauty that seems to spring from designs where you take a blindly pragmatic stance... It's as though ignoring form and considering only function, breeds form of it's own... Very zen ;)

I need to get down to Bovington and take a look at the Challenger 2.

Ahh space... Where low visibility means no light at all and everything else would boil your bones faster than you can send a status byte :o

They don't bother with low light on those things, it's all built for being lit up bright as heck... I see it's in blue and yellow which confirms my memory :)

I hadn't even thought of tanks - last ones I had anything to do with were strictly old school.

Yeh that was an accident for me too, mobile artillery is not my strong point. I came across a declassified order form for the knobs I got, which are from the B-52, and it referenced another which was for the abrams... I never did find the related switch MS number >:( Anyway here's a pic of my muse. It's too big to post here so it's a URL:

http://www.af.mil/shared/media/photodb/photos/060821-f-2907c-272.jpg

Again, beauty springing from practicality. It looks like the bridge of the freakin death star  :D

Like the cute robot said "Input! Input!"

Hahaha I own a copy of that movie... Too much nostalgia, I couldn't help myself! "Fully automatic... Colt 45.... PLAY DOUGH!"

I was thinking about the reg/green thing for you, and had a quick read up on the photoreceptors, and in short: Use red if you don't have to compete with brighter lights nearby, and green if you do.

[Flying Panther]

I've contacted the dutch establishment of Texim-Europe (dutch distributor of Winstar products), they don't have red-backlit 20x2 lcd's in stock, but they can deliver them on request. Texim-Europe is going to check on prizes and delivery time; when I know more, I'll let you guys know :).

They do have Winstar 16x2 RGB-backlit lcd's in stock, don't know what they cost though.

Also, interesting stuff about the military aircraft panel design! :D

[Flying Panther]

I've got some more information from Texim! They can deliver the LCD for a sampleprice of 13,50 euro exl. shipping from Texim to myself (should be about 2 or 3 euro's). Deliverytime is about 3 to 4 weeks.

If I need to order an extra LCD of this type (black characters on red background) for someone else, please let me know asap, as I will order them tomorrow. :)

[Sasha]

I am interested! So you can order only one LCD of same type? Can you order some other type then black on red? If not, I would go with what ever they have. I see they also have some PLED displays.

[Wilba]

Surely you can get PLEDs and all other exotic LCDs on eBay?

Like here?

http://stores.ebay.com.au/Sure-Electronics

[Sasha]

Surely you can get PLEDs and all other exotic LCDs on eBay?

Like here?

I have never used eBay before... Must check who will ship to Serbia. That is not always the case.

I tried to hack LCD for red light but I failed.. First I tried do make new background LED illuminated diffusor which didn`t difuse well, and second try is just adding 3mm thick transparent red acrylic sheet on top of LCD. Result actually looks nice but dimmed. On picture looks better than in real because of higher ISO setting of my camera. At night it`s OK, but  not by day - waaay too dimmed. I also tried transparent PVC sheets but les than 3 layers look more dark yellow than red and 3 sheets of PVC takes all the sharpness of characters... I gave up... ::) 

[Flying Panther]

Judging from the picture you did a pretty good job at the hacking ;) But I can imagine that 3mm of acryllic dims the light lot.

[Wilba]

Those yellow-green backlight displays usually have a green-ish background... i.e. it's green even when the backlight is off. That probably won't help reflect red light. If you're hacking ;) the black-on-grey edge-lit LCDs might be your best solution, but they're probably just as hard to find in 2x20 as black-on-red, and you're still stuck for getting good contrast. I think a green PLED would compliment your red LEDs very well, even though it's not red, you'll probably enjoy the much better contrast ratio and view angle.

[Flying Panther]

Today (when I was placing the order) I found out that Texim only sells to companies, and that way I can't order them there >:(. So it seems I'll have to search for a new way to get my hands on a nice red LCD..

[stryd_one]

Just ask your boss to order it for ya :)

[Flying Panther]

Thanks Pather: one of their distributers is about 20 min from where I live. I'll ring them next week.

If I can source a 20x2 red backlit LCD, who else is interested?

Just curious, any news on the LCD's? ;)