Anyone with color (or B/W) LCD display experience

[astra]

Hi
I'm looking for any info how to control colour LCD display
I want to build general pourpose LCD display with possibility to connect
to mikrocontroller
I need to display only static information but i high resloution (1024x768)
256 colors
The main pourpose is to show in graphical form information about alarms
(in big alarm system)

In project it is not possible to use standard PC motherboard!
Regards
Hugo

 

[techie]

Use a standard LCD monitor with 1024x768 resolution and VGA cable. For the drive, the best way is to use an old ISA bus based VGA card capable of 1024x768 resolution. If that is not avaialable, you will have to use a PCI or AGP based card. But you have to know how to drive the card with your microcontroller.

Another method could be to make your own VGA card. As you say that the display will be used for static purpose, you can make use of a dual port RAM with the microcontroller updatign the video memory and a display driver section pulling data at the refresh rate, converting it to VGA analog voltage and sending to monitor. I guess an FPGA will be required to meet the speed requirement.

You can even think of using a display controller chip from dozens of manufacturers to make display controllers like SIS, S3, trident etc

 

[techie]

Another idea is the use an embedded PC card with VGA output. Such cards are quite common these days and low speed cards based on 386ex shouldnt cost more than $100. If you are paying $200 plus for an LCD monitor, this shouldnt bother you.

 

[mr_ghz]

Hi astra,

Epson has several display-controller chips that can directly drive a color STN (or also b/w) LC-Display. Some of these controllers has also an internal video-memory, so you don't have to worry about it. The connection to a uC is relatively easy: the controller has a 8-Bit bus and understands some commands (drawing lines, boxes and so on).

Bye