There are things everyone loves: ice cream, kittens, and honkin’ large TFT LCD screens. We’re no strangers to small TFT’s – from our itsy 1.14″ color display that graces many-a-TFT-Feather to our fancy 3.5″ 320×480 breakout screen. But most people who dabble or engineer with microcontrollers know that you sort of ‘top out’ at 320×480 – that’s the largest resolution you can use with every day SPI or 8-bit 8080 interfaces. After that, you’re in TTL-interface TFT land, where displays no longer have an internal memory buffer and instead the controller has to continuously write scanline data over a 16, 18 or 24 pin interface.
RGB TTL interface TFT displays can get big: they start out at around 4.3″ diagonal 480×272, and can get to 800×480, 800×600 or even 720×720. For displays that big, you need a lot of video RAM (800×480 at 24 bit color is just over 1MB), plenty of spare GPIO to dedicate, and a peripheral that will DMA the video RAM out to the display continuously. This is a setup familiar to people working with hefty microcontrollers or microcomputers, the sort of device that run cell phones, or your car’s GPS navigation screen. But until now, nearly impossible to use on low cost microcontrollers.
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Python for Microcontrollers – Adafruit Daily — Python on Microcontrollers Newsletter: Open Hardware is In, New CircuitPython and Pi 5 16GB, and much more! #CircuitPython #Python #micropython @ThePSF @Raspberry_Pi
EYE on NPI – Adafruit Daily — EYE on NPI Maxim’s Himalaya uSLIC Step-Down Power Module #EyeOnNPI @maximintegrated @digikey
