Do big displays for microcontrollers exist?

[MicroBlocks]

Many displays from 2" to 8" available with SPI.
You do not need to push out a whole frame constantly so they can even be driver by a tiny mcu as long as it has a SPI.

Those displays have controllers, even font chips.

A easy way to get things done is by using a 'micromite'. A PIC32 based system that is programmable in BASIC and for fast function you can add routines written in C.

If you need to display some values on a display using BASIC is more then sufficient. Only when you need to do lots of calculations and/or super fast data acquisition you need to go to C

Checkout Geoffg.net for more details.

[Back2Volts]

Nextion may be an option?

https://nextion.itead.cc/

Interesting warning in the 7" description:

Note: there's a small power supply test board and a wire for you to test if the electricity supply is enough or not. Please see below image how to use it.

CAUTION

Working under insufficient power supply condition will damage the Nextion model easily.
Blurred screen?  Flashing?  You may suffer from power shortages.  Power off at first possible moment, NO MORE repeated trying to damage your Nextion model. 


 

[sca]

Weintek do some HMIs which are easy to interface to (eg serial modbus), simple to program, and relatively cheap compared to a lot of industrial HMI type oojamaflips. Something like the basic i- series perhaps

http://www.weintek.com/globalw/Product/Product_i.aspx



sca

[Delta]

As people have asked, are you needing a large, high resolution graphical display, or just a large font alphanumeric display.

Two completely different things!

[e100]

As people have asked, are you needing a large, high resolution graphical display, or just a large font alphanumeric display.

Two completely different things!

Large font alphanumeric display.

Just a small amount of text, updated once per second.

Imagine an old SCADA display from the 1970's looking something like this



or this



but not as fancy as this



These are from https://scada1966-96.blogspot.com.au/ which talks about the evolution of control systems at a steel works from 1966 - 1996.
The processing power available for their whole system is similar to the processing power in today's $5 microcontrollers.

[mubes]

Buy-Display have SPI (and even I2C!!) displays up to 10.1". Personally I'd avoid I2C but I don't see an issue with the SPI ones if you can keep your writes to the display down....that depends on the intelligence of the controller chip on the other side of the SPI interface. The particular one I just looked at has a RA8876 on board which supports fonts etc. (Video below). I would _not_ advise trying to use one of these for realtime video or something though ..... the comments others have made about the bandwidth of SPI definitely hit home in that circumstance!.



(Edited for formatting to move the video)

[e100]

Weintek do some HMIs which are easy to interface to (eg serial modbus), simple to program, and relatively cheap compared to a lot of industrial HMI type oojamaflips. Something like the basic i- series perhaps

http://www.weintek.com/globalw/Product/Product_i.aspx

sca

7" screens with a graphical interface builder similar to the Nextion and 4dsystems.

Locally I can buy a Lenovo 10" (1280 x 800) Android tablet for US$160. No support for a serial port, but I can run a VT100 emulator (it's all I need) and talk TCPIP.

[e100]

Buy-Display have SPI (and even I2C!!) displays up to 10.1". Personally I'd avoid I2C but I don't see an issue with the SPI ones if you can keep your writes to the display down....that depends on the intelligence of the controller chip on the other side of the SPI interface. The particular one I just looked at has a RA8876 on board which supports fonts etc. (Video below). I would _not_ advise trying to use one of these for realtime video or something though ..... the comments others have made about the bandwidth of SPI definitely hit home in that circumstance!.

http://www.buydisplay.com/default/serial-spi-i2c-10-1-inch-tft-lcd-module-dislay-w-ra8876-optl-touch-panel
looks to be the closest yet to what I'm looking for.
The driver board is US$69.96 and the actual 10.1" display panel is priced at $9.51. Assuming this is correct, wow, it gives you an idea of the true cost of the LCD display hardware.

[Delta]

As people have asked, are you needing a large, high resolution graphical display, or just a large font alphanumeric display.

Two completely different things!

Large font alphanumeric display.

Just a small amount of text, updated once per second.

http://www.reitberger.de/English/Large%20displays/Alphanumeric_LCD_Display_TK/Alphanumeric_LCD_Display_2.htm

or a few of these

https://www.rapidonline.com/winstar-20-x-4-large-character-alphanumeric-lcd-displays-500165

[mubes]

http://www.buydisplay.com/default/serial-spi-i2c-10-1-inch-tft-lcd-module-dislay-w-ra8876-optl-touch-panel
looks to be the closest yet to what I'm looking for.
The driver board is US$69.96 and the actual 10.1" display panel is priced at $9.51. Assuming this is correct, wow, it gives you an idea of the true cost of the LCD display hardware.

Not quite...the headline price is for the LCD, the 9.51 is for the resistive touch overlay. Nonetheless, I think the prices are incredibly low nowadays, even at retail!

[NEYi]

If power consumption isn't an issue – VGA is a way to go.
I recently tried generating it via SPI, here are the results:

Used cheap STM32F103, since everything works on interrupts – there are plenty of free processor time left, you can embed something like this in your project or use the F103 itself for doing all the job.
The original idea belongs to some italian guy named Artekit, here's his article with the demo project: http://www.artekit.eu/vga-output-using-a-36-pin-stm32/

P.S. I also want to have some big display for my homebrew projects so I ordered a cheap VGA screen from Chinese, costs around 20 bucks.
http://www.aliexpress.com/item/7-inch-Raspberry-Pi-IPS-LCD-With-HDMI-VGA-AV-Screen-Display-Monitor-Module-For-Pcduino/32371317014.html?spm=2114.13010608.0.63.pNABuV
Can't leave any reviews yet, it's still on it's way.

[Lukas]

HDMI and DSI aren't completely out of reach for your average arm MCU with built-in LCD controller:

For HDMI, just hook up an HDMI transmitter to the LCD controller, not much harder than VGA.
For DSI, take a look at Mike's work: http://www.electricstuff.co.uk/nanohack.html with a bit of twiddling. There are RGB-to-DSI converters as well.

[Rasz]

I have two solutions, one is easy and clean, second one is clever, creative and cheap, but complicated and hackish:

1/ use TV as a display, its trivial to generate composite signal even with something as weak as attiny

2/ you CAN drive LVDS LCD with weak micros, you just need to be clever about it. esot.eric figured out how to do it, here is a project driving laptop 1024x768 LCD over LVDS with attiny
https://sites.google.com/site/geekattempts/home-1/drive-an-old-laptop-display-from-an-avr
https://github.com/ericwazhung/avr-lvds-lcd
the trick is to limit resolution (obviously)

[dannyf]

If you are talking about TV sized large display, the easiest would be to get a micro or mini with HDMI or VGA output and hook it to a TV or monitor.

Another route would be one of those pads, Android or iPad. Or even a netbook (plus Chromecast). Much easier and likely cheaper than a customized solution.

[westfw]

How about simply using a laptop computer?  New laptops can be had for under $300 (cheaper than your ascii terminals used to be), cheaper for minimal, used, or chromebooks.

[NEYi]

How about simply using a laptop computer?  New laptops can be had for under $300 (cheaper than your ascii terminals used to be), cheaper for minimal, used, or chromebooks.

Well, not everybody lives in the US.
300$ seems to be kinda wasteful for others.

Large font alphanumeric display.
Just a small amount of text, updated once per second.

Hey e100, I think I found exactly what you could use:
https://hackaday.io/project/9992-low-cost-vga-terminal-module
Embedded VT100 terminal with 640x480 VGA output on STM32 F0 chip.

[CM800]

What is generally considered a good 'solution' for an HMI style project? full RGB, metro style looking.
5-7 inch screen or more.

I've seen the rather nice units from microelectronics and so on, are they generally in the price range to be expected?

They look fine for hobbiest / 1-10 off, but I'm not sure what is the general consensis for a volume solution. (100-10,000 off)

[obiwanjacobi]

Use something like an EVE2 chip?

That chip does SPI(4) against the MCU and drives VGA on the output.
Also offloads a lot of drawing logic from the MCU.

[2c]

[janoc]

What is generally considered a good 'solution' for an HMI style project? full RGB, metro style looking.
5-7 inch screen or more.

I've seen the rather nice units from microelectronics and so on, are they generally in the price range to be expected?

They look fine for hobbiest / 1-10 off, but I'm not sure what is the general consensis for a volume solution. (100-10,000 off)

Well, if you are building something large scale, industrial, you buy a ready made HMI unit talking standard protocols, so that your PLCs and what not can use it. But those are expensive - thousands of $ /piece. On the other hand, we are talking machinery that costs hundreds of thousands $, so a kilobuck or two for a screen with a touch interface or keyboard with a panel mount is not much.

As an alternative for a simulator of such an industrial machine (i.e. something that will never see the actual factory floor but needs to look and behave like the real thing), we have recently used a RaspberryPi paired with an 15" industrial touch screen monitor - ET1537L from Elo, with the Intellitouch touch screen. Those are originally meant for things like POS terminals, but they are built like tanks.

The monitor has DVI and VGA inputs, so driving it from the HDMI on the RasPi is trivial using a simple cable adapter. The touch works out of the box with the open source driver on the RasPi, connected over USB, emulating a mouse. $500 for the monitor + $30 for the RasPi gives you a very professional looking solution. The RasPi was mounted on the back of the monitor using a VESA mount and the entire assembly is installed in a standard industrial metal cabinet that houses the other controls too, using the provided mounting hw. Normally the monitors are powered from a 12V power brick, but we have used a 12V DIN rail supply instead that powers also the RasPi through a small buck converter.

Then to build the UI you have a lot of choices in Linux, but my colleagues decided to simply run Chromium on it in kiosk mode and point it to a web page with the necessary controls. Works like a charm.