Bascially I have created my own LCD Keypad using a phone. I'm sure some of you already know how and such but I will add this tutorial to help those who are wondering.
This all started when I wanted my own custom made keypad for my MX2 Series LCD. I looked all over the house for house hold products to help me in this endevour. Lucky for me I found some and this is what is so great about this tutorial... it uses all house hold products
Materials: Phone, A Matrix Orbital LCD, Gluegun, IDE Cable, LCD Tester (http://www.lcdforums.com/download/Displ ... taller.zip) lots of time, a steady hand.
Difficulty: Hard
Part 1: Understanding
Some phones, if you are lucky enough to have one; will have a 10 pin female jumper coming off the back of the keypad that is connected to the buttons on the phone. Concidently the Matrix Orbital LCD has a 10 pin male jumper to plug in keypads or other input devices. Unfortunately this female jumper does not have an extention and forces you to plug it directly into the back of the LCD, which is not good for ANYTHING. If you plug it in directly this means you will have the buttons on the back of ur LCD and upside down or sideways or every which ways... not pretty and not convient. This is where the IDE cable comes in; this will allow us to make a so called "extention" for our home made keypad. I will explain how to do this later on in the tutorial... but for now lets get started. Keep in mind this may not work for everybody thats why this tutorial is longer than it probably should be. Included in this tutorial is the testing involved to make sure everything works perfectly and you dont loose a telephone for no reason at all.
Part 2: Taking apart your phone
This is probably the simplest and most rewarding part of this procedure. Simply take apart your telephone and get to the bare bones of it. This will determine whether or not you have the correct keypad to make this work. Some phones have it... some don't... my Nortel phone did. Once you take apart your phone you should see a sepearte piece where all the buttons connect to (much like your keyboard); take off the buttons and look on the back of this piece. If there is a ten pin female jumper you are in buisness... if not then stop reading this and go get another phone or buy the Matrix Orbital keypad
Mine looked like this: (sorry I couldn't get any before pictures, but ignore the glue and the wires coming out of the back):
Next thing you have to do is connect the keypad directly to your LCD and test it out to see if it works. So go ahead and download the LCD testing program provided by Matrix Orbital config the program... hit all the buttons on your keypad and see if you get a response... if it worked. Your in buisness.
Now you can stop right here and not care about what your LCD looks like or care about the feel or posistion of the keypad, but I would suggest it... go ahead
read furthur.Part 3: IDE Cables (Basic Understanding)
Before I begin let me just say I do not know of a computer piece that is a ten pin IDE that has a male and a female end (this is why this step is needed) if someone is able to find a computer accessory that is a 10 pin IDE with a male and female end please tell me cause that would make life A WHOLE lot easier.
For those who don't know what and IDE cable is. Let me show you:
Every computer lover has some lying around the house and they are perfect for this job. Many people don't know how these work though I certainly did so let me try to explain it to you. The IDE cable has 40 wires (if you are using a 40-pin which i suggest you do) inside the cable. These wires can be seperated and stripped. You must understand the layout of the IDE cable before venturing on. As you can tell the wires are bunched up together and there is a red line. This shows you which wire is wire number 1. Wire number one corresponds to the female hole #1 located on the jumper of the IDE cable. I have drew a diagram to depict the layout of the jumper:
As you can see odd number run across the top and even along the bottom. We are going to be using the Odd number for our project since the prongs on the LCD run horizontally we cannot use the even numbers.
Part 4: IDE Cable Construction
First off you will want to get your longest IDE cable and cut off the one end leaving one end with a jumper and the other end just wires. You will then see how you are going to see which wires you will use. Everyones should work just the same as mine did since all IDE cables are generic. I plugged the male prongs from the LCD into the female holes 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 17, 19; a total of ten. Picture below:
You will then want to elminate all the wires from the IDE cable except nubmers 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 17, and 19. In order to do this you will want a pair of scissors or wire strippers and cut down the edge of each wire and pull seperating each wire from one another. Cut off every even number wire and every wire after number 19, which will only leave wires 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 15, 17, and 19 free. Picture below:
Now you want to strip the ends of each wire; use your scissors or wire cutters to strip off about an inch of coating from each wire. This is a very delicate procedure because you do not want to cut any wires. After you are done stripping each wire you will want to twist them up because they will end up all "frayed out".
Part 5: Testing your IDE
Now that all your wires are twisted here comes the hardest part. Before we go ahead and glue the wires into the keypad you will want to make sure that everything works correctly (it should so no worries here but you will want to make sure anyway); you do not have to do this step but I suggest it just incase it doesn't work in the end and you loose a phone.
You will want to somehow get the wires into the female jumper on the keypad without gluing them. However you want to do this is totally up to you but what I did was folded the end of the wire over top of eachother so you had a snug fit and you didn't have to hold them in place. Then load up your LCD tester and see if ANY of the keys respond... all you need is one key to respond (considering you did everything right) in order for this to work. Some keys may not respond because the wires arn't touching the jumper correctly, some wires are touching other wires... many problems could occur but this is only the test phase... if you are satisfied with the result you can go ahead onto the next step... if you are not try again or give up all together
Part 6: Final IDE Connection
Now that everything is working fine you will want to straighten out the tips of your wires so that they are crisp and ... well veyr very straight. You will also want to warm up your glue gun for this part. First stick the number one wire into the female jumper... add a bit of glue (make sure the glue doesn't fall into the other hole), let it dry and go onto the next one. Keep doing this until all 10 wires are glued into the jumper. Once they are all glued in apply a long strip of hot glue over all the wires to ensure they are secured correctly. This is what mine looked like:
With luck everything will go as smoothly for you as it did for me. Your wires should be secure in the keypad and everything should be working perfectly. This may not work for everyone so please do not get mad at me if you ruin a phone or burn down your house or something. I cannot be held responsible do anything you do to your equipment... I am simply just posting my own tutorial. Thanks for reading and forgive me for my n00bism