I don’t mean BETTER. That’s a different conversation. I mean cooler.
An old CRT display was literally a small scale particle accelerator, firing angry electron beams at light speed towards the viewers, bent by an electromagnet that alternates at an ultra high frequency, stopped by a rounded rectangle of glowing phosphors.
If a CRT goes bad it can actually make people sick.
That’s just. Conceptually a lot COOLER than a modern LED panel, which really is just a bajillion very tiny lightbulbs.
Not sure if you mean VFDs or amber LCDs, but Matrix Orbital sells both sorts in small quantities that you’d use in a project and can interface to a microcontroller – I was interested in them myself when looking for small VFDs, years back. They’re going to be segmented alphanumeric or grid displays, though, not things with physical custom display elements like those car dash things, but that’s kinda part and parcel of small-run stuff.
https://www.matrixorbital.com/
https://www.matrixorbital.com/blc2021
Just choose the “amber” option if it’s an amber LCD you want.
Can also get their displays via Mouser or Digikey.
That’s exactly the kind of display I’m talking about. Nice to see they’re still around.
The ones I have are all just grids, higher resolution than these but still comfortingly blocky. I’ve actually replaced the dash display recently since the original one got deep fried under the sun and lost all contrast when the weather was above 20°C.
Ah, good to hear it. They do (or did, and I assume still do) also have higher res displays.
Going back to an earlier bit in the conversation, where you were concerned about light sources in the car, I think that auto-dimming might also help (not just with VFDs, but the brightness of any in-car display). My car dash has the option to automatically set brightness based on ambient light levels (something that I wish my desktop computer monitor could do…part of “dark mode”'s benefit is a mitigation for devices that don’t do this). I don’t know if that was a thing back in the 1980s or so, when these display designs were popular.
I also kind of wonder if eye-tracking, which has come a long way, could be made reliable-enough and responsive-enough to toggle off displays if the car can detect that a user is looking somewhere away from them. Maybe be conservative, not with some critical displays, but stuff like the radio or clock or something. Eye tracking systems normally use the near-infrared, as I understand it, not visible light, so I’d think that you could theoretically do it in a darkened car without problems.
All of the car’s interior lighting (all in amber) does dim automatically when I drive under a bridge or into a tunnel, and automatically dims when I turn on the headlights. So some rudimentary dimming was implemented in 2000 when it was made. No clue where the sensor is though.