fpga4fun tft lcd driver in stock

First: There are several types of cheap touchscreens: resistive and capacitive (intro from 3m). And under touchscreen I mean touch panels (digitizers) - the thin multilayer panels which feels touches, but don"t display anything. Touchscreens can be combined with LCD/OLED screens to get display with touch capability. Resistive touchscreens are sensitive to pressure, and you can use any stick to press them, they also had problems with multitouch (sensing several touches at same time). Capacitive touchscreens are often used now in smartphones (since iPhone), and they sense capacitance of human body, working only with fingers or special conductive styli.

So, our second step is the touchscreen controller ASIC: the device between microcontroller or FPGA and the touchscreen. Controller will do all needed magic to detect touches and translate information about them into some digital protocol, like COM (RS-232) or USB in ancient controllers for PC, or simple SPI and I2C for microcontrollers and FPGAs (you should know how to implement SPI/I2C for FPGA; the fpga4fun site may help you: spi, i2c). Many small touchscreens sold now may include some controller, integrated into their PCB or flex wire.

Third step: if you want to make prototype with LCD display and touchscreen, especially with small size LCD (up to 6″), the touch panel may be already integrated into display. And because virtually all LCD have the controller to output some information to display (again, fpga4fun has some introduction into using LCD with FPGAs), they probably will have integrated touchscreen controller too.

Now we can start speak about your case: "what I could buy". If you already have FPGA board, you can search for some LCD+touchscreen for some popular hardware prototyping platform, e.g. for ardoino or raspberry pi. For example, adafruit shop has both separate touch panels, lines and buttons even without controller: http://www.adafruit.com/category/60. Also they have several LCD+touch like 2.8" TFT with STMPE610 touch controller (both SPI and I2C, selectable via pin). There are several on sparkfun.com too. Make sure that you understand how to connect the LCD to FPGA, both electrical and protocol requirements. Check is there touch controller, or you need to implement it in the FPGA with ADC (and there should be ADC on your FPGA board).

If you don"t have FPGA board or if you have no any FPGA experience, it can be better (and costly) to find FPGA kit with optional LCD+touch, but not from chinese vendors. There are lot of chinese kits in cheap section of ebay"s search "fpga touch", but they may have not so good tutorials and demo projects as right vendors. There are 7" kit from Terasic (2000 USD, VEEK-MT-C5SoC), or 7" 250USD LCD+touchpanel module for 1800 USD DE3 or 600USD DE2 FPGA boards. And for Digilent, there is 150 USD VmodTFT 4.3" TFT+touch (manual) compatible with Digilent boards with VHDCI connector, like 300 USD Nexys 3 board, 450 USD Atlys board, or 1100 USD Genesys superboard.

I haven"t used LVDS at all - cheaper and easier to purchase boards for that. And the highest (or is it lowest?) VEE I"ll use is -28V for the dual scan 640x480"s. Driving TFT"s is much easier, just faster. Things start to get hairy when you have to deal with colour tables for CSTN, using FRM where each byte written to the display is RGBRGBRG etc..

>> > RTFM is the universal answer for all of this. There may be some tutorials, but they likely won"t cover the particular LCD you are using - that said, try Googling. The "M""s in "RTFM" are the datasheets for the LCD and the FPGA.

>> > - First start electrically - what does the data sheet for the LCD say is the electrical format of the signals it accepts? (3.3V TTL? LVDS? 1.8V logic? etc.). Then see the FPGA data sheet to see if you can find an IO standard that matches. Hook the two up accordingly.

>> > - Next, write some basic VHDL/verilog/UCF files for the FPGA to instantiate the signals to the LCD in your FPGA and set everything to the appropriate IO standard.

>> > - Then dig into the LCD datasheet again and figure out what commands or data formating it needs and get cracking on a VHDL/verilog state machine or data formatter that accomplishes whatever it is that you want to do with the LCD. Depending on the application it was meant for, most LCDs are either command and buffer based (that is, you write some commands to it, then write to a frame buffer on the LCD controller), or they are video stream based (i.e. no commands necessary, just send raw RGB data continuously).

>> > RTFM is the universal answer for all of this. There may be some tutorials, but they likely won"t cover the particular LCD you are using - that said, try Googling. The "M""s in "RTFM" are the datasheets for the LCD and the FPGA.

>> > - First start electrically - what does the data sheet for the LCD say is the electrical format of the signals it accepts? (3.3V TTL? LVDS? 1.8V logic? etc.). Then see the FPGA data sheet to see if you can find an IO standard that matches. Hook the two up accordingly.

>> > - Next, write some basic VHDL/verilog/UCF files for the FPGA to instantiate the signals to the LCD in your FPGA and set everything to the appropriate IO standard.

>> > - Then dig into the LCD datasheet again and figure out what commands or data formating it needs and get cracking on a VHDL/verilog state machine or data formatter that accomplishes whatever it is that you want to do with the LCD. Depending on the application it was meant for, most LCDs are either command and buffer based (that is, you write some commands to it, then write to a frame buffer on the LCD controller), or they are video stream based (i.e. no commands necessary, just send raw RGB data continuously).

What are FPGAs used for in preference to microcontrollers? There are several answers to this question. Logic consolidation (where one replaces a number of digital ICs with a single IC) is a big reason for using FPGAs. Due to the large number of logic elements (LEs) and I/O pin resources in an FPGA, a number of functions can be placed inside the same FPGA. For example, an ADC controller, a number processor, and a display driver (among other functions) can be placed inside an FPGA. Many commercial products use FPGAs in this way to make products smaller, lighter, and cheaper.

Several books and websites offer help and guidance to FPGA users at all experience levels. Chief among these are FPGA manufacturer’s own websites where one can get an enormous amount of free learning resources targeting all levels of expertise; www.fpga4fun.com is a popular website with several introductory and mid-level projects for hobbyists to build.