Post by thread:Recommendations on LCD controller chips

Folks, I'm putting together a DRO (Digital Read Out) display for a small vertical mill that I have in my shop (a Clausing 8520). The good news is that I have a Hitachi LM215B 480x128 monochrome LCD panel in a ruggedized case that I got at a great price :-) The bad news is that the recommended Hitachi LCD timing controller chip, e.g., a HD61830, is obsolete and no longer available. Solution? 1. Use an 18F PIC to generate the 1 MHz stream of 4-bit nibbles to constantly refresh the display at 1/64 duty cycle -- timing is a bit stressful for this chip. 2. Epson has an LCD controller part that looks like it will more than suffice, the S1D13700, and is now available (Digikey, about $10) Any recommendations for other LCD controllers for this primitive LCD panel? Requirements include: a. on-chip frame buffer for at least 480x128x1 b. compatible with driving the LM215B (which requires four 1 MHz single-bit streams for the four quadrants of the display, multiplexed as a stream of 4-bit nibbles) c. any scan converter functions in the controller, e.g., line generation, text generation, shape generation, etc., are a plus d. integration with open-source 2D graphics libraries for the PIC or similar processors would be wonderful :-) Comments? Recommendations? TIA, Mike Palo Alto, CA

> Solution? > > 1. Use an 18F PIC to generate the 1 MHz stream of 4-bit nibbles to > constantly refresh the display at 1/64 duty cycle -- timing is a bit > stressful for this chip. Look at the new PIC24 Graphics chips? The PIC24FJxxxDAyyy series chips have USB and a GPU designed for driving graphics displays. I haven't looked closely at them, so don't know if they drive glass directly or expect an intermediate controller. -- Scanned by iCritical.