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Table of Contents
Driving the Motorola F3 e-paper display
The Motorola F3/MOTOFONE was the first (and still is the only?) mobile phone with an e-paper display. Although this is not a pixel-based display, like found in eBook-readers (e.g. the Amazon Kindle or the B&N nook), it is still quite nice for experimenting with low power microcontroller projects.
E-paper/bistable displays have the ability to sustain the display content even without the supply of power, so initial idea I had was to build something like a clock, only powering the display when updating it every minute.
The display
The display consists of 182 individually drivable segments, which form a row of six 14-segment characters, a row of six 8-segment characters, and many symbols used for user notification and the menu.
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| The PCB of the display | Display showing all segments |
Display controller
As you can see from this picture, the used display controller is a Solomon Systech SSD1621. Unfortunately there is no public datasheet, so I had to sniff the (32 bit) SPI communication between the TI Locosto baseband processor and the display. The protocol turned out not to be very difficult, just some initialization, some commands for actually writing the display content, and a command to refresh the display with the just transmitted content.
Interfacing with the display
Discussion
Hi Can You publish list of command to driving this display?
I don't have a list, but take a look on the driver I wrote, there are some comments: https://github.com/steve-m/epaperclock/blob/master/src/display.c
I am fascinated by this little phone. And I notice on amazon the many people have purchased peripherals for it, like power supplies and headphones, in the last year which makes me wonder if it is becoming popular. Anyway, the clock seems to lose a minute a day at least when in the 24hr mode. Do you have a fix or do you have a guess as to why? I greatly admire the detective work you've done. Your work is excellent.