i found this lightbox without keyboard at the second hand store. i thought i’d see what i could do.

There’s hardly any info on the Cresta AS-0216.

The websites i found, looking like the same (or similar) device;

There’s a blog about a repair of a Cresta-0216;

My device looks like this (pictures can be enlarged by clicking):

i’ll be posting some update if i have them

  • rtwinOP
    2·
    1 year ago

    Replaced the original board with Arduino Nano

    After having an idea of how the logic worked, i connected the Arduino (impressive size difference!)

    Result

    At the moment, it’s a fixed text dancing over the screen.

    The flatcable has the following pins;

    • +5v --> connected to Arduino nano pin +5v (Not the Vin pin)
    • Gnd --> connected to Arduino nano pin Gnd
    • Clock --> connected to Arduino nano pin D2
    • Data --> connected to Arduino nano pin D3
    • Horizontal line 1enable(top) --> connected to Arduino nano pin D4
    • Horizontal line 2 enable --> connected to Arduino nano pin D5
    • Horizontal line 3 enable --> connected to Arduino nano pin D6
    • Horizontal line 4 enable --> connected to Arduino nano pin D7
    • Horizontal line 5 enable --> connected to Arduino nano pin D8
    • Horizontal line 6 enable --> connected to Arduino nano ping D9
    • Horizontal line 7 enable(bottom) --> connected to Arduino nano pin D10

    The nano is said to be protected for connecting both USB and +5v power source simultaneous (the UNO isn’t)

    Basically, how the program works;

    • it slides in all the bits for a single row via the data and clk pin
    • it enables the appropriate horizontal line and disables it again
    • goes for the next line
    • it uses a char[19*5] array which acts as a bitmap which is rendered to the LED screen.
    • a function renders a text with offset and wiggle to the bitmap. i found the asscii font via this link
    • rtwinOP
      1·
      1 year ago

      I’m having memory shortage in the Nano, mostly because of the ascii-font table. Also, the cpu power is quite limited. Any extra work immediately affects the scrolling speed. e.g. performing a math.sin() for each column slows down the so much that the display to flicker. Doing a webserver task as well, will not work.

      i’m investigating a NodeMCU ESP8266 board, as it also support creating a Wifi Access Point(AP). An AP would allow for configuration by web-browser. But it seems the NodeMCU board doesn’t have proper General Purpose I/O-pins. They all seem to be affected at boot… https://rabbithole.wwwdotorg.org/2017/03/28/esp8266-gpio.html

      Here’s a picture from that website to remember:

      Above: ESP8266 GPIO digital behaviour at boot, when running a simple Arduino application that does nothing except to set all GPIOs to output a low value at boot.