How to make a very slim watch and keep battery life long? In this Hack-a-Gecko project, they tried to catch two birds with one stone.
The Idea
We thought it would be cool to utilize the extremely low power EFM32 in combination with an extremely low power display to create a wrist watch demo application. And usually, the smaller and thinner something is, the cooler it is. (Admittedly, wrist watches do not necessarily follow this trend… big watches.)
Anyway, we wanted it slim. The starting point was the memory LCD display from Sharp (link). It is truly a Nano ampere display technology. And it is also thin, only 0.75 mm. A watch also needs a battery, cool new technologies exist such as the Thinergy battery, but the voltage of 4.1 V is a bit awkward. We decided to use a standard 3.0V CR1616 cell as it can power the EFM32 and display directly. Thickness of battery + display is 2.35 mm, is it possible to design the electronics as well within this thickness limit…? Challenge accepted!”
“As LVDS is a differential signal standard we can’t just connect it directly to an MCU even though it supported the larger display resolutions. So as we already had to use some kind of converter in between we decided to go with an FPGA and embed a complete display controller solution into it.
The FPGA is connected to the LVDS display using an 8-bit differntial pair interface. Then it is connected to a 16-mbit ISSI SRAM for the framebuffer and finally to a 16-bit Host interface which is made compliant to the Motorola-8080 standard which is commonly seen in other TFT display controllers such as ILI9320, SSD2119 and SSD1963.
And as we both need a lot of pins (over 50 I/O pins) and a reasonable portion of available logic we decided to go with the 250K version of the Xilinx Spartan 3E device.
The standard Host interface we made makes it possible for any microcontroller or microprocessor to write to the display controller and thereby display graphics on these larger resolution displays.
Even a small and a bit slow Arduino will be able to display graphics on the display though it won’t be able to do full screen updates that fast.
But to make it a bit more featured and more comfortable to use with smaller microprocessors we have made some fast Clearings and write commands that doesn’t require a lot of write cycles from the Host microprocessor.
So currently the display controller supports the following commands:
Set framebuffer writing pointer position (X,Y)
Set framebuffer access region (X0,Y0,X1,Y0)
Reset framebuffer access region
Framebuffer writing – write pixels to pointer position
“The parts required are simple. You’ll need an LCD that you can tear apart, a box, light source (60 watt bulb in my case), a camera, some film negatives, plexan/glass, and all the necessary cables.”
hackaday did a great work with the creation of a 100% DIY picture frame. It seems to be a must have gadget, because you can build one by yourself.
“We set out to build a 100% DIY, scratch-built digital picture frame. Our frame has a 12bit color LCD, gigabytes of storage on common, FAT-formatted microSD cards, and you can build it at home. ”
In Thailand habe ich dieses tolle Teil aufnehmen können. Es ist kein Plakat sondern ein Display. Da macht Werbung schauen doch Vergnügen. Allerdings habe ich das meiste dann doch nicht verstanden. Gut das es Bilder dazu gab.
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