After mapping out the segments on the LCD salvaged from the base station of an AT&T CL84209 cordless phone system, I have reached the limits of what I can do in the absence of additional information. It has been wonderfully instructive to have a handset from the same system with its own LCD. I found that both LCD respond to the same command protocol, so I could power up the handset circuit and watch what happens under a logic analyzer then try to replicate the same behavior for the base station LCD. Now it is time for me to remove the LCD from the handset circuit board. I wanted to do so for two reasons:

  1. I don't really want to keep the entire handset circuit board. It is designed to talk to a base station that no longer exists.
  2. It might be hiding some useful secrets underneath the LCD. I have a working knowledge of how all the pins work, but I might learn more from probing the circuit board independent of the LCD.

A bit of time with the solder station and I have separated the LCD to see that there's... almost no components hidden underneath.

Just a single side-illumination LED in the upper right corner marked LED3. It feeds into a backlight mechanism much less sophisticated than a Fire tablet's backlight.

But now we can see copper traces on this side of the circuit board. I was happy to see that my arbitrary left-to-right pin numbering matched what's silkscreened here, purely by accident! I had thought pin 1 or 5 could be the power supply, and decided 1 was enable and 5 was supply. Now I get confirmation because 1 is a very narrow signal trace and 5 is a much thicker power trace. 2 and 3 were also thin digital signal lines for I2C, and 4 is connected to a big grid-patterned plane consistent with ground.

Those were great confirmations of my earlier guesses, but even better is information about the rest of the pins. The surprise was that pin 9 appears to be connected, because I had thought it was one of the capacitors I saw on the back side. Another surprise is that pin 6, which I thought would connect to a +5.2V supply, seems to connect only to one of four vias (marked by white circles) going to the other side of the circuit board.

Following those four vias to the other side, I find a pair of capacitors. Now that the LCD has been unsoldered, my multimeter could measure their capacitance: the one on the left read 823nF and the one on the right 775nF. Looking over popular capacitors on Digi-Key, these might be 0.82uF +/- 10% capacitors. But even more importantly: now that I can see the traces, I understand one capacitor bridges the +3.3V line and the +5.2V line, and the other bridges the two square wave lines. My electronics knowledge isn't good enough to know what this means. But once I replicated this part of the circuit, I saw a voltage boost converter in action.