Controlling controller-less GLCD

I had one of these CLGLCDs for some time, salvaged some time ago from retired tape library. The controller module was not salvaged, but looking at images (search for 263645-001), looks like it was driven with FPGA and unlikely it can be repurposed. General sentiment about these modules seems to be that it would be hard to do it with Arduino and you need something specialized like SEDxxxxx controller, which are difficult to find or come in tiny breadboard un-friendly packages. Also, The number of pins you will need to control the controller might be higher than what you need for the bare LCD module.

Something similar has been done:

On the other hand, people have driven VGA monitor with 8-bit AVR...

So here is my hack of the module, driven by different small Arduinos. Code and more detailed description is available at GitHub

Static image

Among the first thing I tried was to display image stored in flash. I used 3x 9V batteries for negative voltage and trimmer as V0 voltage divider. The first successful attempt was this:

I still do not remember how I managed to flip the image on this one (see where the flat cable is?). Anyway, there is 'simple' example in the GitHub repo...

Text mode

Changing the data at runtime was more chalenging. For start, we don't have 9600 bytes of memory on AVR Arduinos, at least not to drive this thing in graphic mode. Below is my hack for driving this display in text mode, with font stored in flash and text screen buffer in SRAM.

The short version: You need assembler to this on AVR:  

...
lpm r24, Z  
;----------            (CL2 rising edge)
out %[data_port], r24
ld r30, X+
swap r24;              (CL2 rising edge)
out %[data_port], r24
lpm r24, Z
;----------            (CL2 rising edge)
out %[data_port], r24
...

 Again, there are more technical details on GitHub.

Required hardware

For my module (F-51543NFU-LW-ADN / PWB51543C-2-V0) I used: