oh hey I found one of my Cursed Cables that I actually vitally need.
The legendary mini-USB to VGA adapter!
oh hey I found one of my Cursed Cables that I actually vitally need.
The legendary mini-USB to VGA adapter!
This is from one of my 5" backup-camera-display LCDs.
It's not USB at all: they're just misusing the connector because it has (almost) enough pins.
I don't know why either
@foone oh HECK is that like.... RGBHV in there?
The justification just seems to be "VGA is too big to fit here"
And obviously we couldn't put VGA on the other side, because... reasons.
Here's the PCB. You can see that they already had to make it non-rectangular to give us room for the HDMI + TRRS jacks, if they just did the same on the opposite side they'd have room for the VGA.
Maybe they were reusing an plastic injection mold and didn't have one with a VGA hole, but they had one with USB and still wanted to add VGA?
And you can see the labels here to figure out how they ran VGA (a famously 15-pin connector) over the nominally 5-pin mini-USB port:
horizontal and vertical syncs end up on pins 5 and 4 (Ground and USB OTG), then RGB are pins 1-3 (VCC, D-, D+). Ground ends up on the /shield/.
VGA is supposed to have separate grounds for each of those: There's an h-sync ground, vsync ground, and return pins for each of the colors. They just merged all of 'em into one ground pin.
This also leaves out all the EDID/E-DDC stuff that VGA does, which is another 5 pins, including the +5v line.
That also means these 5 (red) pins can't be connected to anything, so they only left them in the connector out of laziness.
And these 5 (grey) pins are all commoned together.
@foone Well if that ain't the most cursed thing I've seen today...
someday when I finally design my own monitor (like I keep threatening) I'm gonna make a 5" model too. And #1 thing I'll do is NOT FUCKING THIS
other fun things about this little LCD monitor:
It has two speakers. They're not left/right, they're "HDMI/AV audio" and "beeps".
It also mounts the LCD upside down, for cabling reasons. They handle that by setting the defaults in the firmware to rotate the screen 180°.
This means if you ever reset your firmware settings, it'll start showing everything upside down, including the menus.
It's also got something hidden next to the power button...
An infrared receiver! But this never came with a remote. I'm also not sure why you'd need this? This thing is tiny. If it's far enough away that you can't just push the buttons on the front, it's probably too small to really watch anything on.
Here's the LCD back together, with floppy disk for size.
@foone ohhhh heck it is Cursed RGBHV and I love it
BTW if you're looking for an LCD like this, this one has no model name. Just check amazon/aliexpress/ebay for 5 inch backup monitors, and find one with the connectors you want. They're all over the place at different resolutions, qualities of LCD, and connectors. Usually pretty cheap, too, like 30-50$
Here's one that looks better than mine! It just takes 5v over USB instead of 12v through a barrel jack, and it has a full-size VGA adapter and also BNC video in?
@dg3hda It looks fine. It helps that it's a 5" display that's pretty cheap to begin with, so... the VGA looks as good as the HDMI, frankly.
@foone so, how muddy is the image on the display connected this way? Common impedance of the combined returns in the shield may cause some crosstalk I guess
@xgranade Bad Things. You'd shove 5v down HS+R, which might fry the scaler chip
@foone I shutter to think what would happen if someone plugged that into an actual mini-USB port, expecting it to be an adapter.
@Mondobizarrro not here but I've got some of those cables.
They usually need special monitors because VGA-style "component" is R/G/B, not Y/Pb/Pr like most monitors with component in.
I should go through my USB bin sometime and count how many Illegal Cables I have.
Probably a good number!
Although I don't keep this cable in there: It's not USB, at all. It's VGA
annoyingly I may have just destroyed this monitor by taking it apart to show yall. I may have ripped the LCD ribbon cable!
Turns out ribbon cable damage doesn't matter.
We've got Void Spiders.
annoyingly I do have a matching LCD in my spare-panels-bin, but it's got a different connector, so I can't just swap it in
@crazybutable I'll one up you there: I have a USB A to USB A to USB A cable. That's right, three ends!
@foone I have a usb-A to usb-A
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