I was looking at some pictures of the Makerbot the other day and thought it was cool how they used Ethernet cable for connecting some of the boards together. I was also trying to find something useful to do with these LCD’s I had lying around. Then I came up with the idea of driving the LCD over Ethernet cable.
First, I knew that the ST7565 LCD that I was using is a serial LCD, which means I only need 4 or 5 digital pins to drive the LCD. There are 9 total pins total on the LCD including the backlight. Since there is a backlight GND (LED cathode) and a GND to run the display, I really only 8 connections. This is the number of connections in an Ethernet cable.
This ST7565 graphical display looks great, costs less! The dark gray pixels are visible in daylight, and there’s also a full RGB LED backlight, which you can control with PWM to make any color you can imagine.
Four mounting holes and a blank 11 pin 2mm-pitch labeled breakout on the side – we just soldered some wire to each hole as shown in the photos, its very easy. (The LCDs have no wires soldered in when we ship them)
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Just to clarify, it’s not being controlled over Ethernet, but rather over an Ethernet *cable*
You are correct. I had it written in the text, and have now updated the title. Thanks.