Suggestions for selecting a Colour LCD

Hi all,


Ive got experience with monocolour GLCD's 128X64 ect. I now want to move onto a larger colour screen. Are they much more complex? Can i drive the screen with a Pic18F4550? Do i need some graphics controller inbetween? I would like to buy one can any body give me a link to a screen which has avaliable libraries.


thanks,
B

Re: Colour LCD

HI

Some LCD come with graphic controller on board - look at the LCD interface and LCD DS (data sheet) for interface type

when using a graphic controller you will need lot of RAM (mostly dependent on graphic LCD size and color dept)

So if you want to display a small menu usin 2 or 4 color a small micro like a PIC can due

But if you want to display picture and high graphic you will need lot of RAM so jump to larger micro like STM32 or find a PIC with a lot of RAM (>64K) inside or a micro that have interface to external RAM (this way hardware get complicated )

All the best

Bobi

The microcontroller specialist

Colour LCD

Hi Bobi,


Thanks for the reply. Ok im getting it now. RAM is important. I can imagine its hard to find drivers for some colour LCD controllers and its a horrid task to write one.

Re: Colour LCD

Hello!

brucelee2 said:

Hi Bobi,


Thanks for the reply. Ok im getting it now. RAM is important. I can imagine its hard to find drivers for some colour LCD controllers and its a horrid task to write one.

Click to expand...

Just for your info, here is an article my boss just wrote (but I did the demo).
It is linked to a video showing what can be done with a moderate power
microcontroller (MSP430F5438). (See following URL).

**broken link removed**

This doesn't have a lot of memory (16 k), but in fact I access the data using
512-byte buffers (in order to access the SD card). The filesystem can be run
on a 2k bytes RAM system (for instance it works with a F169 chip), so I guess
you wouldn't need more for that kind of application.

Even if you use more than 4 colors, you can write nice menus (using pixmaps
for their background, that you can edit using any PC), you can make menus that
are quite reactive. It takes around one second to write a page of 63 icons in this
demonstration. So if you use always the same pixmap as a background (i.e. if
you don't have to read it everytime from the SD card), it becomes a lot quicker.
I will try to make another demo one of these days, using only one background
for all the menu tiles. I'm sure it will be extremely fast.

Dora.