[sdiy] Cheapo LCD display

[Eric Brombaugh]

On 09/25/2009 02:17 PM, Scott Gravenhorst wrote:

> Nice work, Eric.  I like Earl - what/where is he from?

Thanks!

Earl is the main character in a comic strip called Red Meat:

http://www.redmeat.com/redmeat/

They used to carry that in our local alt newspaper. No longer, but the 
website is still active. Red Meat is rather... odd.

> I need to get to work on an LCD project of my own, I bought a graphics LCD 128x256 at
> All Electronics for a few bucks -$12?, I have all of the docs and they look like they
> match the unit.  Wiring it will be a little weird, I need to just dive in and do it.
> I think I saw a 640x480 unit for less than $20 in the All Electronics catalog last
> week.  Dunno if it's color, my unit is not.

I've found that the physical interface to these LCDs is usually the 
biggest stumbling block. Electrically they're not so bad - usually 
either SPI or some simple parallel interface. Shouldn't be too tough to 
get yours going.

> My strange way of doing this will be to get it working using an FPGA directly
> interfacing with the LCD.  I can use PicoBlaze as a microcontroller.  Once I get it
> working there, I should be able to fairly easily port it to the PIC board I bought for
> it.  (I have fewer problems troubleshooting a Verilog design than I do a PIC design)...

Nothing wrong with that. Only downside is that it's a bit more fiddly 
work coding for the Picoblaze in assembly than doing it on a standard 
MCU with a C compiler. Otherwise it's all just bits.

Let me know how it goes.

Eric