Thursday, March 26, 2015

Minima - Again?

I have been back playing around a little bit with the Minima code the last couple of days.  I have also been looking at TFT displays for my microcontroller projects.  While not really a hobbyist price range, I stumbled over a nice group of displays from 4D Systems in Australia (www.4dsystems.com.au) that allow you to easily create some very nice displays without a lot of programming and simple serial interfaces to them that operate at high speeds and offload graphics drawing tasks to the display which sports its own processor.

You design the display layout on the desktop computer and save the user-interface elements to a micro-SD card that then plugs into the display.  Interface to the micro-controller is transmit/receive data, ground, 5V and reset.  Easy Peasy...

Here is an example display for the Minima that I have been tinkering with.  Not bad for a first attempt.  (I am not the best UI designer...  Ok, I suck at it...)



So, it will be fun to see where this leads.  Being a touch screen (they have both TFT and CAP Touch available) it can be used for input as well as output.  I am using the simplified tools that have a selection of UI elements that can be placed, sized and programmed on the display as well as Arduino and Raspberry PI libraries to encapsulate the serial communications protocol.  There is also the ability to talk to the lower level primitives, so we will have to scope that out as well.

More to come...

No comments:

Post a Comment