Surplus POS VFD displays

[Tom Katt]

Not nixie, but they are glass tubes ;-)  Also not vintage, but heading that way thanks to cheaper lcd and oled...

I recently bought a few of these surplus ELO E122426 2 x 20 char point-of-sale (cash register) displays on eBay...  They have a single USB interface that appears as a std serial port on the pc and provides power.  I haven't cracked them open, but I would not be surprised to find a std ttl serial pinout on the board somewhere.  These are really easy to use - just send them some serial text and away you go.  I have one running on a Raspberry Pi and another displaying stats on my pc via some free software (AIDA64).  Anyhoo, you can find these for under $25 shipped and they look quite nice, both the display itself and also the case which is a nice polished black.  I have located the documentation and a config utility that allows you to set a few things (baud rate, local power on message etc).

Just figured that I'd toss this out there in case anyone is interested.  I have no affiliation with the eBay seller (and there are many anyways) - but this one is currently the cheapest at $22 shipped.

ELO VFD Rear Facing Customer Display USB E-Series ESYxxE2x | eBay

[David Pye]

They *are* cool.  Pity they don't post to the UK.

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "neonixie-l" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to neonixie-l+...@googlegroups.com.
To view this discussion, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/neonixie-l/4fc68d81-8d51-4159-bfa3-a24807bd0bd1n%40googlegroups.com.

[gregebert]

Too good to pass-up at that price, so I bought one. Thanks for posting. I have a single-line VFD display that has been sitting in a junkbox for more than 10 years and have done nothing with it because it requires support circuitry. This thing is ready-to-go.

I was pondering the 8-character LED unit from another neonixie article, and decided against it because it's too small.

[Tom Katt]

On Monday, December 15, 2025 at 3:24:09 PM UTC-5 gregebert wrote:

Too good to pass-up at that price, so I bought one. Thanks for posting. I have a single-line VFD display that has been sitting in a junkbox for more than 10 years and have done nothing with it because it requires support circuitry. This thing is ready-to-go.

I was pondering the 8-character LED unit from another neonixie article, and decided against it because it's too small.

While these VFD displays work out of the box, it can be helpful to have the documentation if you want to utilize some of the advanced features, such as custom characters.  There is also a VFD_Setup utility that provides the ability to configure several parameters, such as increasing the default 9600 8/N/1 to 19200 for a bit faster transfer speed if desired.  

These displays are referred to as LD220 in the literature.  There are apparently several industry standard protocols used in Point-Of-Sale devices - I found the best for general PC use is  'Ultimate' - the configuration utility allows you to specify what protocol the display uses.  These are predominantly things like terminal control codes to move the cursor around (home, locate, etc) and blink, reverse etc.  The documentation describes the control codes for each protocol.

Again - none of that is really needed if you just want to spit out text to the display.  But for clocks and such you may want to incorporate locating the cursor to the positions being updated rather than re--writing the entire string.

If I did things correctly you will need a password to get to my files - the pw is neonixie ;-)

Link: VFD

[Tom Katt]

Didn't realize I could just attach the files lol...  This is probably easier ;-)