Quote: Originally Posted by ryanerb
basically, my police scanner has a lcd on it. somehow the characters get printed on it, and are somehow generated. do you think it would be possible to interupt the data going to the lcd with a 8051, and then serin to my pc where i could display it on a digital form made in VB? i know there is winradio , but thats 500 bucks, and i dont see why this wouldn't work. also, is there someway to digitally control the pots that say change the frequency? -Ryan
If you look for the LCD driver chip and tap into the parallal interface to a micro like an 8051 or something like a basicx, then you can decode the 7 or 8 bit parallal data and determine what it is. There will also be some enable bits and a clock bit that you will have to tap into. Its been a while since I worked with character LCDs, but there were only 2 driver chip manufactuers, Hitachi and Toshiba. Find the chip, find the datasheet and start from there.
There are digitallly controlled pots, Dallas Semiconductor made some long ago. Dallas got bought up by TI a few years back.
Unless you are a hotshot embedded programmer, this is a ***** of a project and there must be an easier way.