Display monitor for use with MCU

There are lots of choices, but basically you want an LCD graphics display with sufficient resolution for your purposes. Try Digikey and Mouser (even if you're not in the US they'll give you ideas). Try web searching on "graphics LCD display".

I know you can get displays that are basically what you get in laptops and cell phones -- your job then becomes one of deciding on price, performance, and size.

This is the sort of question that illustrates why I keep up my subscription to "Circuit Cellar" and "EDN" magazines. One of the best ways to learn what's available is to look in the ads there, then do web searches.

You will need to decide what you want the graphic display to look like.

Will this be a one off or part of a product.

Then decide what resolution will support those graphics.

Then you will need to decide if the msp430 can support that display or will you need a separate graphics processor.

Adding graphics to an low end processor will be a challenge.

Starting over to extend a finished project to a hard decision.

Good Luck

PS: this might help:

hamilton

Adding graphics to a low end processor is easy enough, if you don't mind the tail wagging the dog -- just pair the graphics display up with enough processing power to get the job done, and talk to the low-end processor with a low-bandwidth channel.

If the display is monochrome and bit-addressable, then an MPS-430 will be more than enough.

What program is running on the computer to read serial (ASCII ?) data and display what? a graph? just some numbers?

Depends on your answers above how much processing power is required in the "display" device and how much you can modify your gadget to suit a dumb display.

r?

A few different approaches might work depending on your needs. these are just representative, in most cases there are lots of other similar products

an LCD module with integrated graphics controller:

a small LCD screen like in a cell phone (again with integrated controller);

use a beefier controller with an LCD controller built in

attach an embbeded GPU + msp430

use a micro to bitbang low res video out to the LCD

use an FPGA to implement a bitmap video display (search fpga video)

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Or get the $6 PIC24FJ256DA206, It comes with 16 bits graphic controller.

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I'd never recommend a PIC to anyone after my last experience. Buggy C compiler, buggy programmers, errors in documentation, reps who won't return phone calls, long waits for tech support via e-mail. It's not worth it.

What country or state are you in, to get this kind of service ?

I have heard about people having problems like this, but have not talked to anyone that actually have been involved.

hamilton

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Yes, no PIC lower than PIC24.

I found no deviation from GCC.

Your's or Microchip's?

No worst than any other.

I guess it depends.

Thank you everyone for your suggestions!

I took the cues for better searching on the web and found this, with an integrated controller.

Looks good to me, but since I haven't worked with displays before I can't be sure. Talking to the guys who make this, they say it should be straightforward for my application of displaying medical waveforms.

Anyone used this before?

--------------------------------------- Posted through

Yes, that will work, but isn't it better to have single chip integrated controller?

With the PIC24FJ256DA, you get 256K Flash, 96K SRAM, 16 channels A2D,

No. but I would like to know your through-put using a serial interface.

If you do go this route, but time how long it takes to fill the entire screen with one color, then how long it take to fill the entire screen with another color.

If you use async serial what baud rate ?

Thanks hamilton

Bad benchmark as one would assume a "smart" display would have commands like "fill region" (even if only "fill rectangle").

A better choice would be copying a full-screen bitmap to the display (assuming you are interested in pixel write rate).

OTOH, the OP might find using a "draw polyline" more appropriate for his application (ECG).

n't

Yes, i have done something like that before: generating jpeg graphics from data file.

For example, let says we are using the Android Serial Adapter to talk to the Android phone or tablet. We can just build the jpeg image in "/ sdcard/DCIM/Camera", Many apps can display images there directly.

Since it is tricky to pass with standard input stream, we can build everything in the command line.

/data/local/bin/edit /sdcard/DCIM/Camera/graph.dat create 0666 /data/local/bin/edit /sdcard/DCIM/Camera/graph.dat append x-axis TIME /data/local/bin/edit /sdcard/DCIM/Camera/graph.dat append y-axis ECG /data/local/bin/edit /sdcard/DCIM/Camera/graph.dat append 0 100 /data/local/bin/edit /sdcard/DCIM/Camera/graph.dat append 1 200 ... /data/local/bin/jped /sdcard/DCIM/Camera/graph.jpg from /sdcard/DCIM/ Camera/graph.dat

The adapter can also hookup an LCD or VGA monitor directly.