My car won’t start. It turns over, and since it’s a non-interference engine, I’m almost positive that the timing belt skipped while I was fucking with the drive belts.

So, I’m doing the repair myself. And since I’m a nerd, I went ahead and ordered an OBD-II to UART conversion board from SparkFun. The plan is to hook it up to either an Arduino mini or a Raspberry Pi so I can read out some realtime data from the car’s ECU. Oh, and the error codes…

And since I have other uses for the Pi coming up, I figured I’d hook up an old character display I had kicking around. The part number of the board itself is GEB-2294V and it has a Sanyo LC7985NA LCD driver chip on it. So it should be able to be used with the Arduino’s parallel LCD library.

The only problem was finding a decent pinout for the thing. I’ve found it before but it disappeared from the net so I figured I’d post my findings here in case someone else has need of it:

1 Vss Logic ground 2 Vcc Logic 5V max 3 Vee LCD drive 0-5V 4 RS H/L Reg select H: data input L: instruction input 5 R/W H/L H: data read L: data write 6 E H,H<L enable signal 7 Not connected in 4 bit mode 8 Not connected in 4 bit mode 9 Not connected in 4 bit mode 10 Not connected in 4 bit mode 11 DB4 12 DB5 13 DB6 14 DB7 On the board there is a gap between the pins here 155v for backlight 16 Ground for backlight

Which, is the same pinout as most of the other parallel LCD’s out there. But better safe then sorry.

Now I just need to figure out the rules about having LED sequencing inside of cars based on vehicle speed or fuel consumption…