Quote: Originally Posted by NiteMax Mark
I can't tell from your parts which CCD Board you have, but the Color one can produce mirrored output and the LCD Controller itself supports mirror too.(It is there in the thread somewhere.)
Also: If you're feeding 12v DC regulated into your project box to power everything, you won't actually need the Power Supply Board. The only thing LCD related that the Power Supply Board provides is LCD Contrast Adjustment. This can be replace with a 5k Ohm Potentiometer instead.
The Camera itself will work fine with 12v DC too.
Has anyone ever played with the Digital Potentiometers? Done properly, it would be possible to control the LCD Brightness and Contrast from your PC!
I haven't, but another thing you could do is use a PIC microcontroller to drive a transistor via Pulse Width Modulation to provide dimming as well. A bonus is that it's fairly easy to get it to communicate with a PC via RS232.
For under $20, you could get an 18pin Olimex protoboard that has everything (voltage regulator, comm port, max232, 20mhz crystal, etc) all wired up and ready to program. Just need to run TX/RX to the MAX232 and the hardware is done. PWM is easy to generate in software or just get a pic that has a CCP module and it can generate the PWM signals for you.
If you went with the 16F877A and a 40-pin board, you'd get eight levels of ADC too and 32 IO pins overall. Plus two CCP modules.
You need a programmer too, but they can be had for as cheap as $10.
If you're not an assembler guy, you can use Hi-Tech C's free version (PIC Lite), just make sure you get a PIC that's supported in the free version.