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I've been looking into something like this, and it seems the display is the hardest part. I haven't been able to find a large monochrome LCD that is compatible.
by Ninjinka 6y ago
I've been looking into something like this, and it seems the display is the hardest part. I haven't been able to find a large monochrome LCD that is compatible. Now if you don't care if the screen uses a lot of power, is color, etc. then there are a lot of options similar to what you're describing on reddit.com/r/cyberDeck
- kingosticks 6y agoWould something like https://www.adafruit.com/product/4694 https://www.adafruit.com/product/4694 be any good to you?
- Ninjinka 6y agoYes, it's almost perfect, it's just a little small (I'd prefer at least 6"x2" like the Alphasmart) and sold out.
- wanderingjew 6y agoYou can do it for ~$30-40. There are two problems: The screen, and the microcontroller. For the screen, you can just use a regular TFT, and only display one color. This has the benefit of bringing down the size of the frame buffer down from 800x480x8 or 16 to 800x480x1. That's still a lot of RAM for a microcontroller, but you can get displays with onboard graphics RAM, and any small microcontroller can use the on-board GRAM as a framebuffer. Line scrolling is a bit of a trip (kind of like a bubble sort, but on lines of pixels), and blinking the cursor is _weird_, but yeah, it can be done on a $1 microcontroller and a $5 screen. Anyway, here's what I'm working on: https://twitter.com/MrRobotBadge/status/1274490808616419328 https://twitter.com/MrRobotBadge/status/1274490808616419328 It's based on the VT-100. It's got a 69 key keyboard. The name VT-420 was already taken, so it's called the VT-69.
- throwaw4y-plate 6y agoNice!
- jdsully 6y agoBlinking used to be accomplished by XORing the pixels with '1'. The nice thing is it doesn't use any memory to restore it since you just XOR a second time to get what you had back.