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Re: Kopin 320 on a Microcontroller?

I believe the only actual hold up in this area is the availability of the 320M display timings. They are not described in the Kopin datasheet, and I haven't had any success requesting them from Kopin.

The Motorola driver IC datasheet describes some of the timings, but I don't know if anyone would be prepared to start working on this until they had a complete set available (no guesswork).

One of the Motorola driver IC's also had provision for driving a colour sequential LED backlight to provide a full colour display (as mentioned in the previous message).

If we work with 8bpp (for 256 colours) and the display resolution is 320 x 240 pixels = 230 kilobytes per colour frame. As far as micros are concerned, the data rate should be achievable with some of the bigger PIC or Amtel chips. This is too much for PC parallel ports though, even with rates up to 500kHz or so (dependant on hardware and OS).

Maybe a USB based display driver would be possible but this increases the cost. Other options include compression (preferably lossless until the data rate limit is reached).

In short there is more info required before anyone can begin, probably a few months of development to get a prototype and although probably very appreciative, a limited market to satisfy.

I wouldn't see any sense in beginning design of a commercial display based on the 320M now. To drive the small quantities that a lot of the list got surplus (and I think more boxes of 42 are still available on eBay) the TekGear RS170 boards / component kits / PCB's / Motorola chips are a good bet. I agree its a shame it has to be reduced to a composite analog video signal.

Regards,

Nick

----- Original Message -----
From: 
Date: Wednesday, September 3, 2003 12:09 pm
Subject: Re: Kopin 320 on a Microcontroller?

> Hi Brian
> 
> I believe that it should not be that complicated and there wouldnt 
> be too much adc/dac conversion, plus with a microcontroller (I'm 
> thinking some Atmel perhaps) the Kopin 320 grey 
> can maybe become a colour display with a proper back light 
> (basically r/g/b LED controlled by the chip) in stage two (after 
> stage one actually gets the greyscale image displayed)
> 
> Essentially it boils down to programming the proper timing for the 
> microcontroller to convert the signals properly, while the input 
> at the stage could possibly be RGB or Composite
> depending on the supporting circuitry infront of the controller.
> 
> 
> thanks
> 
> -pedja
> 
> 
>  ----- Original Message ----- 
>  From: Brian Kuriyama 
>  To:  
>  Sent: Tuesday, September 02, 2003 8:43 PM
>  Subject: Re: Kopin 320 on a Microcontroller?
> 
> 
>  uhhhh i think i remember someone did that or at least attempted. 
> but uhhhh i wouldn't dare try to attempt it (partly because i dont 
> know that much crap about adc and dac and don't wanna take the 
> time to learn). Anyways it depends on what you wanna do, and how 
> you wanna do it, but i think you gotta define "generic" in the 
> microcontroller biz lol
>    ----- Original Message ----- 
>    From:  
>    To:  
>    Sent: Tuesday, September 02, 2003 1:02 PM
>    Subject: Kopin 320 on a Microcontroller?
> 
> 
>    Is anyone working on connecting the Kopin 320 displays (that 
> everyone and their grandmother got by now)
>    to a generic microcontroller rather than begging Motorola for 
> samples of their chip?
> 

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