I am a newbie and am posting several questions in this forum to learn about developing a system. What is the cheapest and easiest way to connect a display to the Rabbit 2000 kit? Is there an easy way to connect a standard SVGA computer flat panel? Maybe some kind of adapter hardware? I only need to display lines of text.
An SVGA monitor would be rather over-kill and over-engineered to simply display lines of text. And there are no interfaces that I am aware of.
You could either use one of the many LCD Text modules that are about or you could connect the module to a PC or Dumb terminal using RS232 - the rabbit modules have several serial lines built in.
If you only need the text for debugging then remeber that you can use printf to send lines of text to the stdio window in Dynamic C.
Thanks LightHouseMan. Sorry to hear there are no interfaces available.
Of course I will use a PC for development but I don’t want to load down the final product with a complete system. That’s why I would prefer a flat panel and some interface hardware.
As a newbie, I am still trying to figure out why people like these little LCD displays. A used flat panel should cost about $50-75 and will display thousands of characters. A PCI video board would add a few more dollars. As nearly as I can tell, the reason people don’t use this solution is that 1) nobody can figure out how to interface the Rabbit I/O with a PCI connector or 2) gee, we’ve always done it that way. Any thoughts?
Just to throw a little more into the mix, here are some comments that were sent to me by an acquaintance. He describes three display options…
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VGA panels are expensive compared to cheap serial LCDs that can be purchased from places like HSC (http://halted.com/commerce/ccp21599-lcd-display-320x240-3224-h3130-80815.htm).
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PCI, which you would need to connect a cheap PC vga card is not trivial to implement. It requires 16 very high speed signals with very high timing and EMC/EMI tolerance.
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If you wanted to connect a VGA monitor directly to your Rabbit, (which would be cool), you would need to generate 5 analog signals, three of which need to change at around 20 Mhz (see http://lslwww.epfl.ch/pages/teaching/cours_lsl/ca_es/VGA.pdf ) for a better technical discussion. This is doable, but would require a fair share of the rabbits processing power. (this guy did it with an AVR http://www.mcselec.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=222&Itemid=57)
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There is a lot of good information here. – jim
Yes - that about sums it up!
Of course you still have the option of a dumb-terminal - that would give you a full screen text display with a simple serial connection.
Alternatively you could look at one of the 1/4 VGA Graphics LCDs such as the ones used by Rabbit on the OP7200user interface.
In fact, in terms of development costs, it might be better for you to use soemthing like the Rabbit op7200 rather than a core module and try to interface something your self.