posted November 10 2010 6:11.08 by kammenos
Tech News - PCB Heaven
Thanks, Giorgos!
LucidScience is the ultimate open source electronics project website!
Showing posts with label breadboard. Show all posts
Showing posts with label breadboard. Show all posts
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Tech News - PCB Heaven
AVR to VGA D-Sub interface final
posted November 10 2010 6:11.08 by kammenos
Tech News - PCB Heaven
posted November 10 2010 6:11.08 by kammenos
Tech News - PCB Heaven
VGA Video Generator using AVR microcontroller - LucidScience project - NEW
Added : November 03, 2010
It took some time to learn how the five signals used on an analog VGA connection made an image appear on the screen, but the end results were much better than anticipated, providing a crisp 256 by 240 image on the monitor in 256 colors. Although it does take some intensive cycle accurate assembly programming, the basic coding is not very difficult to understand once you have learned what the monitor expects. In fact, making a microcontroller drive a VGA monitor is much easier than creating a video signal for a television because the VGA monitor does all of the difficult color coding for you as long as you send the video signals and sync pulses at precisely the right time. "Precisely" is the key!
Generate VGA graphics using an AVR microcontroller
and an external frame buffer
and an external frame buffer
Microcontrollers are well suited to display information on analog
VGA monitors
If you have been working on microcontroller projects for any length of
time, then you know that it can be difficult to display a large amount
of data, especially when it contains more than just plain text. There
are limits to how much useful information you can display on a basic
character LCD, or even a dot matrix LCD, since most have low resolution,
no color, and a poor refresh rate. I came up against this problem when
working on a robotics project that needed to display a color image
captured from a small camera and decided to see how much effort it would
take to create an image on a VGA monitor using only a microcontroller
to "bit bang" all of the necessary signals.
VGA monitors
It took some time to learn how the five signals used on an analog VGA connection made an image appear on the screen, but the end results were much better than anticipated, providing a crisp 256 by 240 image on the monitor in 256 colors. Although it does take some intensive cycle accurate assembly programming, the basic coding is not very difficult to understand once you have learned what the monitor expects. In fact, making a microcontroller drive a VGA monitor is much easier than creating a video signal for a television because the VGA monitor does all of the difficult color coding for you as long as you send the video signals and sync pulses at precisely the right time. "Precisely" is the key!
The final version completed on a solderless breadboard
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