As you may have read elsewhere I'm moving my MKII into a difficult new car (Lexus RX300 SUV). This has an integrated dash and no place for a DIN chassis.

But there is enough room to mount a small display on the dash. What I plan to do is borrow from Frank van Gestel's Display Server. But instead of sending the pixels over IP I will shoot them out the serial port to a microcontroller connected to a display whose dimensions match those of the built-in display. I can mount the MKII under the seat and control it via the Sony stalk wired remote.

And therein lies the rub - I can't find a good match to the VFD in the empeg. It is listed in the specs as 128 by 32 by 2 (4 levels of gray scale). The gray scale is the rub. I can find some 128 by 32 LCDs or VFDs but all are either monochrome or color. And the gray scale is important because (among other things) it is used to anti-alias the fonts.

So here is my question and request for anyone at empeg who reads this: what is the make and model of the VFD in the MKII and can I buy one from empeg or anybody else?

It's a Noritake-Itron MN12832E.

This is a raw display for which the empeg guys created the driver circuitry - and thereby implementing greyscales. Noritake also make modules which includes the driver circuit, but AFAIK only monochrome.

See this post

/Michael

Thanks for the lead! I guess that explains why I couldn't find a gray scale display on the Noritake-Itron site. I may go with plan B (color display) or plan C (128 by 64 display where two vertical pixles map to one empeg pixel giving me my four levels.)

I'd be interested in a color display. As I brought up in another post, I was thinking about replacing the display in the MK2a with a color VFD. Although this would require major hacking, it might be easier to shoot the display out the serial port. But how do you convert the grayscale to color properly? Wouldn't it be possible to intercept the signal being sent to the display server and convert it into color? You can also add a set of buttons around the external display and shoot the commands back down the serial cable. This way you can mount the Empeg under the seat or in the trunk and run a remote display, a la the Neo 35 (http://www.ssiamerica.com/products/neo35/index.html). Maybe have an IR sensor in the wired remote so you can use the remote control too. This would be good for the reverse option too. Letting people in the backseat control the Empeg without crawling over the driver...or having to lean in to see the text on the face, not that this is really a problem, but it's fun to have a display in the back too.

Regardless of any other technical obstacles, including that there's no such thing as a color VFD (at least according to Hugo), how would you map the colors? The current display has a total of four colors, one of which is black. How do you plan to make decisions about what color should go where? I would conjecture that this is an impossible task. To prove my point, grab one of the logos on riocar.org and try to modify it so that multiple colors look good. Keep in mind that you have to map one color to one other color. It's no fair to decide that this light gray over here should be pink and that light gray over there should be blue, as there's no way for your automatic display interceptor to make the same assumptions.

Well, I didn't say it had to do it with everything including logos. But for simple display such as the info screen, it could be done with the song title in one color, artist in another, time in another, etc. And depending on the model of VFD, I'm sure you can do color pixel shading just like the Empeg is doing in greyscale now. Just pick a color for the boot logo, say blue, and set up 4 color per pixel shading. And if it's not possible with a particular model of VFD, then just use a solid color. Some of the logos might not exactly look like Monet's, but it can't be too bad. Not to metion that it's possible to do more gradation with the current VFD, but the developers decided to give us 4 shades to work with since they figured that would be best. And there arn't infinite color VFD, but there are multi-colored VFDs. For examples of Multi-colored VFDs, look at the following links:

http://www.futabahk.com.hk/asp/product/vfd/vfdmain.asp?lang=1
http://www.zec-vfd.com.cn/english/selection.htm
http://www.noritake-elec.com/applications/audio.htm

Unless I'm mistaken, those are not really multi-color in the manner that you want, but each element has its own color. That is, using the style of VFD on the empeg, each pixel could only ever be one color. So if you wanted the Track Name, Artist, and Album to be red, green, and blue on the Track Info mode, then when you had up a full-screen visual, it would be red on the top, blue in the middle, and green on the bottom, kind of like those filters that people used to put in front of their black-and-white TVs in the fifties that made the top part of the screen blue for the sky and the bottom green for grass.

On the off chance that I am mistaken (), how would you figure out which parts need to be blue and which parts need to be green, etc? I think that it would be nearly impossible. But, then, feel free to prove me wrong on both points.