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Re: Kopin 320 on a Microcontroller?

From: Duncan Entwisle <>
Date: Wed, 3 Sep 2003 16:48:26 +0100

Back from walking the dog..

>>> 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)

If you're talking about one of the 8-bit Atmel AVRs, the maximum
MIPS (from a quick perusal of their website) is 16MIPS.

So, back to that low 25 fps frame rate - in the time between sending
pixels to the display, you would have 8 instructions.  You would
have to update a counter, assert the appropriate signal lines etc
in that time. You also need to find time to get information from the
outside world into the PIC and then the external memory.

I did toy with the idea of going retro...  I envisaged addressing an
external eprom (or flash) with an incrementing counter, and
having the databus mapped to the Kopin's control signals, so
every time the address incremented, the next control signal
was sent out - but I didn't bother going too far down that route.

> I actually noticed your blog about the Vidi project few days ago but 
> you
> have no wiring schematics up or any other electronics detail just the 
> code.

Well, it has only been two and a bit weeks since I *started* - and you
have to start somewhere :-)

My main concern was that I wasn't sure whether I'd interpreted Kopin's
datasheet correctly - and I was hoping that someone might of been
able to provide some input.

> I wonder if 320M and 320C are phyiscally the same just the driver chip
> and the backlight are different (it leads me to believe that when 
> reading
> the specs on Kopin's website).

The way the two devices are driven appear to be different, plus the 320C
operates at a much higher clock speed (as it displays 3 separate frames
for every 1 frame that the 320M has to display) - running the 320M at
that clock speed would violate the timings for the device.  (I suppose
you could run the 320M at 75 fps, but have an effective colour frame
rate of 25 fps, but it wouldn't be as good as the real thing).

Duncan.

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