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Microcontroller VGA output

Hiya,

I am looking into driving a VGA screen from a microcontroller. I am hoping there may be a way to do this from a PIC or ubicom SX chip, although very slowly but that is fine.

The display i am wanting to drive is a chLCD screen (kentdisplays.com)

- although they can be supplied with serial interfaces, it would be preferable for me to drive the screen directly.

It does not need to display ever changing dynamic content and the refresh rate can be as slow as it needs to be, it will only update the image on the screen very rarely (days inbetween each update).

Incase you dont know, these kent displays are 'zero power' screens, which once updated need no power or signal to retain their image, so refresh rates shouldnt be a problem. Just a single-draw and thats it.

Any help would be great, perhaps there are serial/parallel->vga chips out there, anybody know of an easy to use VGA chip ?

Thanks, Alex.

Reply to
Quack
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As OBones said, if you don't need to refresh the display 70 times a second, there should be no need to go by way of VGA - just find out how to address the pixels, and drive them with some interface.

Can you post a link to the data sheet of your display?

Thanks, Rich

Reply to
Rich Grise

AFAIK, if it needs no refresh signal, then it's not standard VGA. I would have a look at the datasheet of those screens to see how to pilot them.

Reply to
OBones

I don't know these exotic screens, but you can find an example of direct VGA generation from a PIC in one of my old articles published in CIrcuit Cellar and available online :

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Friendly yours,

-- Robert Lacoste ALCIOM - The mixed signal experts

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"Quack" a écrit dans le message de news: snipped-for-privacy@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...

Reply to
Robert Lacoste

Hi,

Thanks for your hints, i was just assuming it did, because they call it a 'vga scree', but i think that perhaps just relates to the resolution. I have not received the demo unit yet, which comes with a serial-interface controller, but i dont want to use this controller in the end product.

The datasheet i have is here although it doesnt really seem complete, i am hoping the demo kit will have more indepth documentation;

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Alex.

Reply to
Quack

I'm looking forward to seeing the datasheet 25016. At this point, if it were me, I'd try to contact an actual human at Kent. They might be very amenable to providing data, especially if this is going to be a high- volume product.

The circuit diagram on page five is terribly frustrating! :-)

Good Luck! Rich

(and please, when you post from google, if they haven't written an "include context" button yet, try to cut and paste some context. Thanks.) (and putting 'http://' in front of URLs makes them clickable in most browsers.)

Reply to
Rich Grise

it

high-

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Although it is only regarding their controller/interface, which i dont want to use, its large and costly and does more than i actually want the screen to do.

Thanks again :),

Alex.

Reply to
Quack

Yeah, unfortunately it doesn't tell us what goes on the other end, i.e., driving the pins of the LCD itself. That's the data sheet you really need to design your own interface.

Good Luck! Rich

Reply to
Rich Grise

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