Where does he find such wonderful toys? [Glenn] extracts from a Grass Valley Kalypso 4-M / E video mixer eBay’s switch control surface and since then he has reverse engineered the button and display modules to bend them to his will. The material dates from the turn of the century and the two modules would have been arranged with a few dozen others to complete a video mixed switching console.
But the LCD screens on the cross point switch were a harder nut to crack. He ended up going back to the original source of the equipment (eBay) to get a working control unit that he could sniff. He laid out a man-in-the-middle card that has a connector on each side with a pin header in the middle for his logic analyzer. As with most LCDs, the secret sauce was the boot sequence – something almost impossible to force abruptly, but extremely simple to sniff out when you have a working system. So far it’s been running them under USB control, and if you’re lucky enough to have some of that gear in your parts box, [Glen] has painstakingly recorded all the details you need to make them work.