I recently disassembled an older Firewire external WD drive from a friend because the drive had failed. As Firewire is no longer a thing in the Mac world, I got to looking at the components and extracted this jewel. I really like the fact that the LCD display is static with no power to it, and wanted to try and repurpose it for some other small Rasberry Pi projects I am working on. Does anyone have any information on this module, pinout, specs, anything?
Hey,
From the picture, it’s a segmented LCD, not a dot-matrix one. That means it was custom-built to show specific things like capacity bars and drive names, and it doesn’t use standard interfaces like SPI or I2C.
Without the original controller board, it’s going to be really tough to repurpose. These displays need special AC signals to drive each segment, not just regular digital signals. Unless you can get the original board and figure out how it was controlled, it’s not really usable for Pi projects.
You’re better off going with a regular OLED or TFT screen that supports SPI or I2C for Raspberry Pi.
