3.0 16:9 LCD and TV driver board from Brilldea

Timothy D. Swieter

Hello forum. I have been very busy the last few months, but I am excited to be back and doing some Propeller and Brilldea projects. This particular post today is to show off a new 3.0" 16:9 LCD and composite signal driver board. Many of you have seen and purchased the 3.0" 4:3 LCD and driver board from our site. Unfortunately the vendor has stopped making the 4:3 aspect ratio LCD and all our stock is sold out. However I procured a large quantity of the new 16:9 LCD and driver board.

Attached are some picture of the new product. The driver board is similar, though I think it has a better layout for the connectors. The display is 3.0" diagonal and has a 16:9 aspect ratio. I loaded up a Propeller Demo board with the Graphics Demo program and you can see the results on the display. The image isn't filling the screen, however I believe some adjustments in the Propeller TV driver timing would allow the screen to be filled with the image. In a day or so I will get a video posted showing the image in motion. I can't take credit for making this product, I sourced it from my Asian resources.

The closeup picture of the screen is slightly blurry as I didn't want to use the flash as it would have washed out the screen.

If you are interested in a unit, drop me a PM and we can process any order through PayPal. I'' do an introductory sale of US$40.00 for the LCD, driver board, cable and connector shown. In a day or two I should get the connectors and can start shipping kits. In a week or so I hope to get the a data sheet around and post the product on our web site, but in the mean time we can do business with PM/e-mail and PayPal.

Also - for those with the 4:3 display, I have a bunch of the Mountain King Technologies bezel mounting kits. These kits are an acrylic face plate for mounting the display and driver board. I have white and black kits available. If you are interested in a kit let me know. The price is US$8 per kit plug shipping (US$4.00). You can find pictures of the kit on the Mountain King Technologies site under accessories/LCD mounting I hope to have Mountain King make a kit for the new product as well so stay tuned. You can

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Timothy D. Swieter, E.I.
www.brilldea.com - Prop Blade, LED Painter, RGB LEDs, 3.0" LCD Composite video display, eProto for SunSPOT
www.tdswieter.com

BradC

Nice boards. I've got one of the 4:3 in my car and it has been brilliant. The 16:9 would actually fit better where I want to strap it in.

Can you give us some details on supply voltage and power consumption ?

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Life may be "too short", but it's the longest thing we ever do.

Timothy D. Swieter

Oh yes. The driver board runs on 5.0V and has less than 200mA draw. I turned down my power supply a little bit and the image became scrambled and blurry around 3.6 or 3.8 volts.

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Timothy D. Swieter, E.I.
www.brilldea.com - Prop Blade, LED Painter, RGB LEDs, 3.0" LCD Composite video display, eProto for SunSPOT
www.tdswieter.com

BradC

Sweet.
Is there any way of dimming the backlight ?

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Life may be "too short", but it's the longest thing we ever do.

Timothy D. Swieter

On the connector in the lower right of the board there are signals for color adjustment and brightness adjustment. I haven't tried them yet and I haven't traced out the circuit to verify the function, but the brightness adjustment may be what you want. I don't see anything in particular labeled for the backlight display adjustment. The brightness may just be a signal adjustment on the picture.

I looked at the LCD data sheet and the LED signals are in the middle of the connector. It might be possible to hack or mod the board to control the back light. I will post the PDF of the LCD data sheet on the Brilldea site once I get the product page up.

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Timothy D. Swieter, E.I.
www.brilldea.com - Prop Blade, LED Painter, RGB LEDs, 3.0" LCD Composite video display, eProto for SunSPOT
www.tdswieter.com

Bill Henning

Since it is LED, you should be able to pulse width modulate power to the LED's to control backlight brightness.

Nice display!

Timothy D. Swieter said...
On the connector in the lower right of the board there are signals for color adjustment and brightness adjustment. I haven't tried them yet and I haven't traced out the circuit to verify the function, but the brightness adjustment may be what you want. I don't see anything in particular labeled for the backlight display adjustment. The brightness may just be a signal adjustment on the picture.

I looked at the LCD data sheet and the LED signals are in the middle of the connector. It might be possible to hack or mod the board to control the back light. I will post the PDF of the LCD data sheet on the Brilldea site once I get the product page up.

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Timothy D. Swieter

Bill Henning said...
Since it is LED, you should be able to pulse width modulate power to the LED's to control backlight brightness.

Nice display!

Yes, of course. It is a matter of getting access to the LCD LED signals. The signals are on the 40 pin FPC connector for the LCD, but it is unclear if they are routed to the other easier to use connectors.

For those that are doing cool things with displays connected directly to the Propeller, this display may be a candidate as well. It is a TFT display with 960x240 resolution.

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Timothy D. Swieter, E.I.
www.brilldea.com - Prop Blade, LED Painter, RGB LEDs, 3.0" LCD Composite video display, eProto for SunSPOT
www.tdswieter.com

Ariba

Timothy D. Swieter said...

For those that are doing cool things with displays connected directly to the Propeller, this display may be a candidate as well. It is a TFT display with 960x240 resolution.

Have you an idea of the price for the TFT only?

I think 960 resolution means you have to send one byte for Red, one byte for Green, and one byte for Blue - the full color resolution will then be 320x240, but I can be wrong.
And the voltages are all generated on the interface print. So the TFT alone must be significant cheaper than the whole package to be interesting.

Andy

Timothy D. Swieter

I could sell just the TFT for US$20.

I see what you are saying Andy about the display resolution.

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Timothy D. Swieter, E.I.
www.brilldea.com - Prop Blade, LED Painter, RGB LEDs, 3.0" LCD Composite video display, eProto for SunSPOT
www.tdswieter.com

KPR

So will this board work with the 3 inch tft lcd?? an if so how much for it with and without the lcd??

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New ICON coming, gotta wait for the INK to heal, now we have colour!

Timothy D. Swieter

The board is designed to work with 3.0" 16-9 LCDs. I haven't tried hooking it up to a 4-3 LCD, but the board is different and therefore I doubt will work.

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Timothy D. Swieter, E.I.
www.brilldea.com - Prop Blade, LED Painter, RGB LEDs, 3.0" 16:9 LCD Composite video display, eProto for SunSPOT, PropNET, PolkaDOT-51
www.tdswieter.com

JRetSapDoog

If that's a 16-by-9 (16:9) display with 320x240 px (horiz-to-vert), then those pixels will be non-square pixels.· That's a possiblity, I guess, but the trend seems to be square pixels.· Non-square pixels will, for example, turn circles into ellipses.· In order for this screen to have square pixels and 240 rows vertically, it would need about 426 columns horizontally.· I did a quick cut-out of·the second picture·with the lasso tool to remove the bezel and so on·(trying to correct for keystoning since the screen is shot at a bit of an angle) and I got something similar to 16:9, the difference being attributable to the angle and cropping error, I believe.· Funny thing is, the first time I cropped it, I got exactly 4:3, but I had first scaled it equally in both directions·and·my cropping wasn't as careful.· In that the screen does appear to have a wide aspect ratio, I did it again, and, as said, it does appear to be 16:9.· So,·if the 320x240 data is correct, then·it uses non-square pixels.· Perhaps AUO decided to capitalize on the well-entrenched QVGA resolution (and driver chips for that rez)·while going·with the increasingly popular wider aspect ratio.· BTW, I think AUO just bought a smaller company that specializes in smaller screens to round out their display line.· Oh, BTW2, the distortion wouldn't be that great.· Folks are kind of used to it as they often·watch 4:3-shot·television on a widescreen (makes everyone look just a tad fatter when standing, and look longer/taller with lying parallel to the horizontal).· Anyway, nice looking screen.· I like the fact that the board that converts composite video looks quite a bit simpler/cleaner than some of them (kind of hate to see a ton of chips or a huge chip just to convert the video, particularly if the Prop-side circuitry is simple).



Post Edited (JRetSapDoog) : 4/16/2010 7:31:35 AM GMT