Cathode Ray Tube / Video Displays

Applciation note for XESS XS Board to interface to and produce VGA displays. Does an excellent job of documenting VGA at a very low level.

Erik Reikes wrote:

In a crt, a B field alters the paths of electrons which strike a phospour coating on the front of the tube causing them to glow. So, you move the electrons around which cause different parts of the CRT to glow. Basically you have a decent sized particle accelerator pointed at your face for 8-20 hours a day every day.

Digital to Analog@ Video@

SX Embedded Controller Video Generation

Les [kohegyi.laszlo at LN.MATAV.HU] asks:

Has anybody thought of using the sync out mode of usart of 877 for generating video signal? It can be set up to 5MHz dot clock and you don't have to bother of shifting just feed the bytes. It would be about 250-260 pixels per line.

Bob Ammerman [RAMMERMAN at PRODIGY.NET] of RAm Systems says:

Yep, I do this with an 18C at 10Mhz instruction rate. 432 pixels per line. No problems, looks great! At this rate you get 8 instructions to feed each byte to the shift register... 51 chars per line x 20 something lines...

Characterset data and The character set extractor by Nikolai Golovchenko

Robert Lacostes' PIC'Spectrum: A spectrum analyser with bit banged video display.

See also:

• http://perso.wanadoo.fr/phmworld A 16*10 char 4 gray level display system with 64 ( 8x8 pixel ) characters using the hardware USART to shift out character pixels.

  Schematic Includes a neat little 4 level grey scale circuit using a diode AND gate and resister D2A converter.

  Prototype on Breadboard

  More recent information at the web site.

• http://www.rickard.gunee.com/projects/
• http://mondo-technology.com/genlock.html You can 'genlock' to an incomming video signal by grounding the PIC's clock to the output from a sync detector.
• http://linkline.com/personal/msaavedra/3Chip/3chipinfo.html
• http://members.nbci.com/cable_club/Index.html
• http://www.hutzelman.com/home/hardware/mods/monitor/ repair info

Virtual Network Computing. It is, in essence, a remote display system which allows you to view a computing 'desktop' environment not only on the machine where it is running, but from anywhere on the Internet and from a wide variety of machine architectures.

Archive:

• PICList post "PIC and character generator" +
• PICList post "Fast serial out" +
• PICList post "Hamming codes" minimal hardware for PIC video +