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Has anyone had any luck using LCD screens reclaimed from old electronics with Arduino, such as camcorders etc?

My 8 yr old has an old sony handycam (dcr-trv103) in bits and now wants to use the LCD screen with the arduino. I'm not even sure how I would go about this. Any tips? How do I figure out 'what does what' in terms of the inputs? How would I drive this thing / what do I need to do to send visual images to it via an Arduino?

Here's the front and back panels of the LCD screen, and their hookups.

The Screen Screen

Screen hookup Screen hookup

I'm assuming this is the backlight I'm assuming this is the backlight

backlight hookup backlight hookup

Note: someone identified this as a duplicate of another question about reusing a cellphone LCD screen. This question is specifically about reusing an older camcorder LCD screen. Also that other question has very little answers. I found the answers below useful and educational. Thanks all.

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    Not trivial to say. You need a driver board for this, the signals in the flex cable won't be of much use to you in your Arduino, I think. Might be some parallel interface instead of an easy SPI interface. I would start by identifying where the signals in the flex cable go to on the original board, then identify chips and datasheets for them, and from there find out what protocol the display speaks. Also you might find youtube.com/watch?v=6SOXMDb4cjI interesting. It's an interesting advanced project though, would like to see the results of that.
    – Maximilian Gerhardt
    Commented Jan 28, 2018 at 21:22
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    Possible duplicate of Can I control a cellphone's lcd (+touch screen)?
    – gre_gor
    Commented Jan 28, 2018 at 23:46
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    I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because it is about undocumented and unidentified displays, and not at all about Arduino. Only once you have full documentation of the display requirements could you possibly then have a valid Arduino question, but probably still not a practical one.
    – Chris Stratton
    Commented Jan 29, 2018 at 4:15
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    @ChrisStratton well I'll just save the answers before you do then :D It was a valid arduino question as it involved arduino :) Anyhow, these are some useful answers for my son, so maybe they'll be useful for someone else too. It literally asks the question "Is this worth trying to do with an old LCD screen and an arduino?" The answer is no, which is a great answer, as it saves time :)
    – Agent Zebra
    Commented Jan 29, 2018 at 6:35
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    @AgentZebra the same can also be said for that LCD. You can guess for both of them. That dupe gives you the same answer. And the answer would be the same, regardless if an Arduino is involved, so it is not about Arduino.
    – gre_gor
    Commented Jan 29, 2018 at 14:01

1 Answer 1

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This is likely a type of TTL LCD interface. But it is nearly impossible to describe more as there are so many variations both in hardware and in timing. Likely a steady stream of Red Green & Blue binary data way faster than an Arduino Uno could possibly manage is required to create an image. For the necessary processing power, you would have to utilize one of the top end Arduino boards. Even then, software to create the steady stream of binary data for this particular LCD is still required. Also, there are hardly no standards beyond saying the LCD is a TTL or LVDS. Which means hours spent on developing software for this LCD will likely only work for this LCD.

It would be far easier to just buy an LCD and interface board known to work together. If you are using an Arduino Uno, there is not much processing power beyond saying "I want a circle here" or "I want a line there". Fortunately, there are such COTS parts available. Here is a tutorial describing such a device connected to an Arduino Uno.

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