Hello,
For the last few years I've been the owner of (amongst other) a Beolink 5000 with a detached screen. Being an electronic engineer, I've spent some time looking for a viable (and cheap enough) way to repair the severed display ribbon cable, and found none.
So the last 2 months I've spent a fair amount (okay, the vast majority to be honest) of my spare time working on a screen replacement for my Beolink 5000. I was looking for an off the shelf LCD or OLED display panel with roughly the same mechanical dimensions as the original panel, hopefully transparent as well, but again I found nothing, except an E-Ink Display with possibly matching dimensions.
For those who are not familiar with this technology, E-Ink displays are used on E-Reader tablets, have very high contrast without any sort of backlight, only requires electrical power to refresh the display (can keep a picture displayed without using any power), but quite slow refresh rate (it takes a few seconds to display a picture on the screen).
So now having a potential way forward, I started designing a PCB that would fit in the (tight) space available in the Beolink 5000. This PCB would replace the original display controller and interpret the display commands sent by the CPU as if it was the original controller, including displaying "backside-readable" text on the front side. This was actually a bit harder than I originally thought, because a few hacks were used by B&O engineers to optimise the display's function. For example "frontside-readable" text is indeed transmitted as text to the display controller, but some "backside-readable" characters are written pixels by pixel, so character recognition is required.
The end result pleases me a lot, and restores all the neat 2-way features of this remote, despite the refresh rate being a bit on the slow side
Features :
- Single sided E-Ink display ( that was a given )
- Can display all the original text and indicators (CONTROL and LINK indicator might be wrongly mapped, since I cannot test them. Can someone tell me when they are supposed to light up ? ) Fixed. Thanks to link for describing to me the behavior of the original display.
- Nice upscaled text display (each character is now using à 29*14 font instead of 7*5 on the original display)
- Standby screen
- Low power : power consumption, and therefore battery life should be similar to the original display.
- Low battery indicator ( that one is new ! )
Here is the remote displaying the standby screen :
A close shot of the new screen. Sadly I have damaged the black stencil a bit ( especially the lower part) during my first attempt to unglue the original display from the glass :
The back side. You can see the back of the 3D printed part I designed to hold the E-Ink display :
And here is a shot of my PCB installed in place of the original display controller and its 2 logic buffers :
And as an object of curiosity, the "pathfinder" PCB I first designed to validate the design :
As I understand, it seems a considerable fraction (the majority ?) of the Beolink 5000 still in existence are affected by this screen issue, so I plan to propose this modification to other owners, either as a service or simply selling the assembled PCBs. Please let me know if you are interested !
EDIT 1 : CONTROL and LINK indicator are no longer a problem.
Location: France
My B&O Icons:
