Hacking an old RAF Nimrod control panel

Bought one of these things off eBay for around £35:

Don’t know what it’s for. Probably some sort of comms / radio display. The reason I jumped on it – behind that dark window are 8 of these alphanumeric LED displays:

These little displays are usually around the £15-20 each. Loads of LEDs:

And a little controller chip on the back of them:

Little but not simple (!) – check out all the gubbins [that’s a technical term] in there:

Before trying to get the whole panel working, I hooked up an Arduino to a single display to get it working:

Once you’ve sussed out how to get one display working, figuring out what the connections to a full display panel should be is a lot easier, even if it doesn’t look it:

Success!

Getting an expensive piece of ex-RAF equipment to say naughty words is the sort of thing that gets me out of bed in the morning.

Now that I’ve got the thing working, I’m not sure what I want to use it for. Maybe a new trip computer for the Landrover… we’ll see.