When I was given a retired Honda Accord in-dash CD system, I thought its large LCD and tactile knobs might be interesting. After some introductory information and experiments with salvaged LCDs, I took this system out of my pile and started tinkering with it. Building on knowledge gained from earlier projects I was able to talk to this LCD's Sanyo LC75883 driver chip and generate a segment map.

Segmented LCD units are customized for individual applications, so it was not a surprise to see this display was tailored for what a 6-disc CD changer needs to show. However, I was a little disappointed that seems to be all this LCD could show. This control panel also integrated HVAC control knobs for fan speed and temperature, so I had hoped to see some of that on the LCD. Doing so would have motivated the designer to make things a little more generic, like the alphanumeric text areas I saw on a cordless phone system's LCD. Other reasons I had hoped to find a general-use text area are to show FM Radio Broadcast Data System or CD-Text information, sadly this system supported none of that.

When I tinkered with the Toyota tape deck faceplate LCD, figuring out how to read input was a nice side bonus. I had hoped to do the same with this panel. It had three knobs with good tactile feedback, and a lot of buttons. Tactile sensation or visual appearance for those buttons were nothing amazing, but they were real buttons on the board and not just copper traces that I'd have to bridge with something else. Sadly, I ran into strange problems trying to interact with the inputs on this circuit board that rendered things unusable.

The good news is that HVAC portions seems to be largely independent from the CD player functionality, which made it easier to figure out LCD and related controls. This is, unfortunately, also the bad news because the temperature and fan speed knobs are separate. I suspect they are handled by another chip on this board, which is also under a blue conformal coating and its surface markings unreadable. Perhaps it reads those knobs and drive HVAC motors directly from this board, as a nearby chip not hidden by conformal coating is a Toshiba TA8083F dual DC motor driver. I'm not inclined to figure out the motor control side of this board, but I'm still interested in those tactile knobs, so I'll pull them off the board for a closer look.