How to mirror LCD data to another display?

[SvenH]

Hi guys,

I wonder if you can point me to direction with a very special problem. (English isn't my first language but I do my best to explain as good as I can).

The Situation
A friend of mine is an electronic musician which has very bad, diminishing, eye sight. This is not getting any better with time.
As a result of his bad eyes he's barely able to read the LCDs on his instruments (Elektron Analog 4 or other synth gear) and has to use big loupes to see anything and decipher what's going on.

The Idea
So I was wondering if it would be possible to tap the data lines which goes to the display, extracting the data and then display the data on different device. (RGB matrix panels for brightness and contrast would be cool.)

Most synth displays are not that big, ie 132x32 monochrome pixels, so it is not that much data.
I can even imagine to pipe the extracted data over to an RaspPi to display the data via HDMI on a large TV or something like that.

Thinking a little bit outside the box this could be great to achieve better accessibility for disabled people. Most gear with LCD, specially vintage stuff, uses the same LCD modules and replacements are easily available.

As did a couple of projects with a Teensy board, but the other direction by addressing displays and building midi controllers so am not afraid to solder or write code etc

What's Next?
It would be awesome if you can give me one or two ideas how approach this. I was looking into a Teensy because of its many IO pins and cpu speed.
Do you think this is even possible?

The other route I am looking into is to grab images from the display via a camera and then apply some image processing (with a RasPi4) and then displaying screen data on different displays (HDMI, TV, Monitor)

So that's it, hope this makes any sense to you.

Thanks for your time and cheers from Berlin,
Sven

 

[MarkT]

The problem is many LCD display exist, many are completely bespoke and all have special modulated waveforms driving them to
prevent any DC component (which destroys LCD elements over time).

Camera option sound much more flexible approach. Perhaps such devices are already available for the purpose.

 

[KurtE]

camera to display - You can do today very easily, I would think. That is this last week I received my Arducam Kickstarter RPI cameras... And one of the simple tests to make sure it works, is to simply show a preview image in a window on the screen...

As for LCDs as MarkT mentioned there are lots out there, probably depends on interface. Now if you are lucky and it is for example a serial interface, than probably a lot easier.

 

[cebersp]

What you could try, if you have an old mobile phone: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.spynet.camon&hl=de&gl=US
It does stream the picture via WLAN. Any device with a Internet Explorer and a monitor can make it visible.
I use this to supervise my laser cutter from a different room.

 

[MichaelMeissner]

The other thought might be to investigate if there are alternative synths that use open source (such as ones running on Teensys), and then modify the display on the synths to use a different display. It might not provide as many options as the original synth, but you could adapt it to your needs more easily.