Reverse-Engineering the LCD Display Interface of the Nest 2nd Gen Thermostat
1–10 of 24 posts
Re: Reverse-Engineering the LCD Display Interface of the Nest 2nd Gen Thermostat
#2I love the idea of this. Keep perfectly working things from being made obsolete artificially. They should look at the old Nest Protect next.
Re: Reverse-Engineering the LCD Display Interface of the Nest 2nd Gen Thermostat
#3I immediately recognised many of the commands, both their names and byte values, as exactly the same as those of the Philips PCF8833 from 2 decades ago, an extremely common LCD controller for the tiny displays on mobile phones of the time.
The displays have 320 x 320px square addressable pixels, but only the circular portion is displayed - that is to say you can draw pixels as though they were there in the lower corner, past the radius of the circle, but nothing gets drawn.
Always thought round LCDs (and rounded corners on displays and now GUI windows) were stupid, and this explains exactly why. What would otherwise be perfectly usable pixels are missing, and the panel itself is still square.
Re: Reverse-Engineering the LCD Display Interface of the Nest 2nd Gen Thermostat
#4Author here, if anyone has deeper questions
Re: Reverse-Engineering the LCD Display Interface of the Nest 2nd Gen Thermostat
#5Author here, if anyone has deeper questions
Proud of your work! Keep it up
Re: Reverse-Engineering the LCD Display Interface of the Nest 2nd Gen Thermostat
#6Re: Reverse-Engineering the LCD Display Interface of the Nest 2nd Gen Thermostat
#7I love the idea of this. Keep perfectly working things from being made obsolete artificially. They should look at the old Nest Protect next.
There is a constant stream of artificially obsolete devices, its a lot of work to keep up with that. Seems like we need a Reverse Engineers Anonymous co-operative to receive hardware and donations and pay people to do the work.
Re: Reverse-Engineering the LCD Display Interface of the Nest 2nd Gen Thermostat
#8Author here, if anyone has deeper questions
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Re: Reverse-Engineering the LCD Display Interface of the Nest 2nd Gen Thermostat
#9I immediately recognised many of the commands, both their names and byte values, as exactly the same as those of the Philips PCF8833 from 2 decades ago, an extremely common LCD controller for the tiny displays on mobile phones of the time. The displays have 320 x 320px square addressable pixels, but only the circular portion is displayed - that is to say you can draw pixels as though they were there in the lower corn…
> Always thought round LCDs (and rounded corners on displays and now GUI windows) were stupid
If you've ever used a Nest thermostat before, you'd understand why a square display would be stupider.
It would either:
1. force a larger interface so the square display could have its diagonal fully enclosed by the diameter of the radial control (i.e., oafishly large thermostat too big for a human hand to easily manipulate)
2. force a smaller LCD to fit inside a normal hand-sized radial control, making it less readable to all but the spriteliest of youths
3. make a radial control that is a spinning rhombus, which is pretty ugly
Or we could just do what the Nest does and the only person who "suffers" is the original designer, one time, when they write the code
Re: Reverse-Engineering the LCD Display Interface of the Nest 2nd Gen Thermostat
#10I love the idea of this. Keep perfectly working things from being made obsolete artificially. They should look at the old Nest Protect next.
There is a constant stream of artificially obsolete devices, its a lot of work to keep up with that. Seems like we need a Reverse Engineers Anonymous co-operative to receive hardware and donations and pay people to do the work.
For devices that are connected to internet it should be a best practice at least and probably an obligation to open source the firmware / code that drives the object when the company decides it wants to stop providing security updates.