Announcement about mpc2000/xl LCD Screens (Envision Electron

Mister Ugly wrote:Why can't someone just dissect an existing display and recreate it? You can buy a replacement iPhone screen for $25.00 which the technology is far more advanced, seems there's more to it.

I'm no expert on the matter. I believe the physical hardware is not the issue. It's the software or code that has been the problem with remake attempts.

The blue color is an excellent choice, I was literary thinking about how I wished my screen could be like the Akai s1000 then I discovered the recent video right after... can't wait for these! glow pads plus the new screens plus ultra voilet leds and the 2k will b toooo fresh

Mister Ugly wrote:Why can't someone just dissect an existing display and recreate it? You can buy a replacement iPhone screen for $25.00 which the technology is far more advanced, seems there's more to it.

If it was that easy, it would of been done already..

There is A LOT more to it

All I can say about this is - I'm sure it was expensive to produce.

So - how did I do it the first time? I set the display back-side up under a high power microscope and very carefully removed the top layers of the chip. I found the manufacturer of the display driver (Hitachi) etched into the chip - logo and all. I then pored through Hitachi datasheets for display drivers manufactured between 1992 and 1999. I found it, the HD66108. However, getting the chips was and is impossible - the foundry that manufactured the chips had been closed since 2001! If you know anything about chip foundries - you'll know that you don't "move" designs to another foundry without significant expense. It's much cheaper to just redesign the chip.

The HD66108 display driver was column and row drives plus RAM built-in on a 208-pin TCP (tape carrier package). The biggest problems we had was transposing the data because the way that the Hitachi chip took data and virtually every other chip on the market was exactly backwards. This meant that every frame of display information had to be put into a RAM table, rotated and written back out to the new display that used a Toshiba T6963 driver chip. However, the T6963 is a physically large chip and wouldn't fit on the smaller display board. So, when we did a new LCD we had to put the T6963 and its RAM on our board. It was a real pain...and it locked our board to the display.

About 2/3 of the way through development, we found that the MPC has very poor internal logic transitions. That means instead of nice, clean logic levels of 0 and 1, it has a lot of electrical noise which produces "indeterminate" logic levels - AKA glitches. This meant that we had to "oversample" the data and hope for the best. It didn't always work - as we found out later.

V2 was supposed to be handled by J2E - an engineering firm in Cincinnati run by Jeff Trapp. This joker told me he was a couple weeks from having a working product then he simply stopped returning phone calls. That was two years ago! He stole my products, property of mpcstuff.com and a lot of IP. Just gone. I've never heard from him again.

Our design wasn't perfect. But it was first. We did something that spurred interest and further development. In the end, I am ecstatic that mpcstuff.com was able to pull this off.

thanks for the very clear explanation and your initial hard work envision. this transparency is much appreciated. hardware manufacturing is not easy and props for giving it your best.

Yeah ****, that sounds like a journey. Only to be screwed by some guy at the end.

Just wanted to drop a quick line since its been a little bit. The screens are in final stages of manufacturing. We are getting a small run first before the main run and I will let you know when that run is up for preorder on the site.

mpcstuff.com wrote:Just wanted to drop a quick line since its been a little bit. The screens are in final stages of manufacturing. We are getting a small run first before the main run and I will let you know when that run is up for preorder on the site.

mpcstuff.com wrote:Just wanted to drop a quick line since its been a little bit. The screens are in final stages of manufacturing. We are getting a small run first before the main run and I will let you know when that run is up for preorder on the site.

Do you need any "field" testing of the screens? I got two 2000XL's in desperate need of new screens.

If someone played me like that, it's nothing to get a flight out there to at the very least lay a beat down on him for his f*ckery.

mpcstuff.com wrote:Just wanted to drop a quick line since its been a little bit. The screens are in final stages of manufacturing. We are getting a small run first before the main run and I will let you know when that run is up for preorder on the site.

Good times!

mpcstuff.com wrote:Just wanted to drop a quick line since its been a little bit. The screens are in final stages of manufacturing. We are getting a small run first before the main run and I will let you know when that run is up for preorder on the site.

Yes! My LCD screen is still in good condition, but it is really great that I'll be able to replace it with brand new screen!

envisionelec wrote:V2 was supposed to be handled by J2E - an engineering firm in Cincinnati run by Jeff Trapp. This joker told me he was a couple weeks from having a working product then he simply stopped returning phone calls. That was two years ago! He stole my products, property of mpcstuff.com and a lot of IP. Just gone. I've never heard from him again.

J2E Engineeriing (Jeff Trap), an another MPC Hall Of Shame (first HOS is an owner of Numark and Alesis, Jack O' Donnell.)

Hey,

I recently aquired an MPC 2kxl and the screen looks different from the one I had back in 2010. I am wondering if it's the new screen. I haven't used the machine yet (gonna install a CF), only a little bit to test it.

Hopefully it's not one of the new makes that is glitchy... how can you tell? Either way I only paid 220$ for this good condition MPC (slider doesn't work, everything else looks good) at a local resale music shop.

Ok well let me know if there are pictures or ways you can detirmine what kind of screen it's got. it looks great, hopefully the machine works great too.

JD

i believe one way is that it doesnt entirely fit in the window. like the farthest right line of pixels is not there on some of the envision screens.
also you might notice some lag.

Another update: The first batch of the MPC2000 / MPC2000X LCD screens have arrived to us. We want to make sure everything is running perfectly smooth on the full production version before taking and shipping orders. But it will be SOON! I will keep you guys posted. Thank you for your patience.