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Electronics => Beginners => Topic started by: Robert.Adams on April 26, 2014, 06:54:41 pm

Title: Data for TFT Screens
Post by: Robert.Adams on April 26, 2014, 06:54:41 pm
Hello all,

I'm trying to branch out into displays and mobile devices and I'm working on setting up a 400x240 TFT (Sharp Memory LCD).  For writing the data to the display is there a way to compress the data from the 96000 pixels that are on a frame?  It would be a drag to put a 512kB EEPROM and only get ~5 frames out of it.

Title: Re: Data for TFT Screens
Post by: hagster on April 26, 2014, 08:03:01 pm
Its a 1bit display so you can store 8pixels in a byte. I make that 42 images in 512kb uncompressed.
Title: Re: Data for TFT Screens
Post by: mariush on April 26, 2014, 08:19:49 pm
You can also do some sort of RLE compression on the image data, to shrink the images with minimal decompression time : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Run-length_encoding (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Run-length_encoding)

Depending on the TFT screen and the controller driving it, you may also be able to send sprites (think of an icon or each letter in a font as a sprite) or update just regions of the screen, or upload bitmap fonts into the tft screen..
Title: Re: Data for TFT Screens
Post by: mariush on April 27, 2014, 02:08:50 am
In case it's not clear, I meant uploading sprites and bitmap fonts in the internal memory of the tft controller and then just reference them (for example tell the controller to draw sprite 5 out of 40 loaded inside it at coordinates  x,y).

For a black and white display, jpeg compression is really too complex and unsuitable). If you're really keen on compressing stuff, look for RLE, LZ77, huffman,  (http://bcl.comli.eu/home-en.html) or other algorithms like

https://hg.java.net/hg/solaris~on-src/file/tip/usr/src/uts/common/os/compress.c (https://hg.java.net/hg/solaris~on-src/file/tip/usr/src/uts/common/os/compress.c)
http://oldhome.schmorp.de/marc/liblzf.html (http://oldhome.schmorp.de/marc/liblzf.html)

that are relatively easy to port to microcontrollers