Serial display adaptor board to run PC monitor

[Seekonk]

I have an arduino project and would like to send plain old ASCII characters to a PC monitor display. I have searched ebay thinking there must be a $10 board from China to do this but my search words haven't come up with anything.

[Wilksey]

Hi,
Have you seen the GameDuino2? http://excamera.com/sphinx/gameduino2/

One example of particular interest might be: http://excamera.com/sphinx/gameduino2/samples/helloworld/index.html

[netdudeuk]

If composite video would do them this is a nice cheap way to get data out to a screen

http://searle.hostei.com/grant/MonitorKeyboard/index.html

Probably not much more than your $10 and you can interface to it in several ways.

[Seekonk]

That is pretty interesting.  What I wanted was a simple RS232 type that would turn a standard color PC monitor into screen display like the old LSI Blue Pig (am I showing my age?).  I'm building updated electronics for 1950's era SUN distributor machine and a large 80 character display would be ideal.  Target board is just a $3 mini.  Add all this stuff on and you might as well go with a PC and get data storage.  A month ago there was an article on a board here that turned your computer into an AV entertainment center.  With remote it was only $15 shipped!  I'm sure a simple board is out there though this has possibilities for graphs and control panels.  Project keeps growing in scope.  With all these snap on boards there is a concern about how many pins they use, you run out of empty pins quick.

Now if someone just made that into a board.  40 years ago I had a Z80 demo board and I interfaced it to a S-100 video board to make a word processor for a computer class.  The days are over when I had to do that much work.  Spoiled by all those under $10 boards from China.

[netdudeuk]

I was running the board on my own Z80 computer last year ...

https://hackaday.io/project/182-z80-microcomputer

... but now have a Parallax Propeller colour VGA (640 x 480 @ 69Hz settings: 80 x 40 characters) version ...