That's a PCB with pads that match the connector on the LCD, and a hole cut in the middle to allow backlighting the panel. That way, there are no shadows from the segments on the background. The Analog Discovery is being used as a signal generator to power the segments with a square wave at 50Hz. I vary the voltage from around 1.5v to 2.25v depending on whether I'm taking a pic with all segments on, or turning them on one-by-one to ID the common/segment inputs that turn each one on. The Konami and Tiger game that use the SM510 have up to 132 segments that have to be IDed; the SM511 up to 136 and the SM512 up to 200.
In that pic, I was using my laptop screen as a polarized backlight. But now I'm using an LED light table and polarizing gels. I've got a digital SLR mounted on a camera stand to take pics.
The backgrounds are being scanned with a Canon scanner.
When I catch up with work I can take some better pics of the setup.
