RA8875 Controller

[AtomSoft]

Yep the mcu is awesome. Not too expensive for the power you get. Mikroe is cool ... but not free... I got a copy of crossworks for arm straight from paul who is the ceo... they had a mix up and acused me of having a not so legit copy and I tired to explain it was a trial. In the end he offered me a license for it as a gift. Also a crossconnect was send to my home for free! Thats like $200+ worth of coolness for little ol me lol

 

[skimask87]

Ya, $250 ain't much at all, if their compiler is as good as 'they' say it is. Like I said, I've been all about PICs for the past X years, and have been using PICBasicPro since '98 or so. Got a big ol' stock of those PICs on the shelf, but they're starting to dwindle, if not in number, then in feature set compared to other brands/manufacturers/etc.
And with ARM getting as big as it is, it almost makes sense to get into the ARM side of the house, if anything just to help 'future-proof' things a bit...

 

[AtomSoft]

Makes perfect sense to me. I've got some pic..avr..arm...xmos..fpga..cpld.. and even a propeller chip in my collection. I guess im kind of a mcu whore lol

I dabble in a bit of everything just so I have options to better fit projects.

 

[skimask87]

(change your handle to "MCU hO" )
Right there you've hit one of my biggest problems...lack of variance... I got started on PICs with an issue of Byte magazine back in '87 with an article about a parallel port PIC programmer. Never had a need for anything but PICs until the cheapo Arduino came along and it was a ***** adding that camp to the bench.

...and back to the adapter board thingy...

 

[AtomSoft]

yeah. I got into all this like 6-8years ago and i guess i just fell in love with pic then cheated on her with many other MCUs "MCU hO" lol sounds nice! But my name is already known by some... lol perhaps AtomSoft and then my website be called "The MCU Brothel" lol

 

[skimask87]

Got my board wired up, starting to code, just getting the basics down now (blinky, wire test, etc)
LCD is that same 5" 40pin connector resistive touch screen panel talked about earlier talking in 8-bit mode, "translator" is a PIC18LF4550 @ 48Mhz (only because I've got a couple dozen of them on hand), ttl-serial input/output or USB/serial, will be auto-baud detecting up to whatever a 48Mhz PIC and the code can handle (12Mbps max in the hardware? I forget).

Initial thoughts are to use a 2 character Basic "command" set...2 character ID at the front end, data in the middle, comma delimited if needed, terminated with a null (or something) at the back end

RS - init the LCD, same as power up
PR - print (software will check for overruns in the X or Y direction, and scroll as necessary)
SC - text scale (software will check for reasonable scaling)
SZ - number of pixels in X & Y direction (800x480, 640x480, and so on)
PTT - set a point (software checks)
CS - clear the screen
FC - color to plot/print/draw in
BC - background color of plotting/printing/drawing
RC - draw a rectangle
CR - draw a circle
B(x) - back light set to X*10 % of max
DP - draw a picture, start x, start y, height, width, data...data...data...until done
TR - send back raw touch screen coords (if any)
OR - set screen orientation (X normal/flipped, Y normal/flipped, portrait/landscape,etc)
RD - read the screen, start x, start y, height, width, then start sending back data until done.

Should be good enough to get the ball rolling...and it beats trying to wire up ~20-30 pins to a board every time I want to use it. I'll add code to access the flash chip and SD card as well......eventually.

 

[AtomSoft]

Cool. I like the plan so far. Can't wait to see it in action.

 

[skimask87]

I'm on a roll (except that now I really gotta get a couple hours of sleep)...
Got the hardware running, got some very basic firmware running, a couple of commands working over a serial port @ 9600 (will get sped up a bunch eventually), etc.etc.
This is the "command set" I'm be working off of:

ARC - draw an arc of a circle
BCL - background color of plotting/printing/drawing
BK(x) - back light set to X*10 % of max
BMP - draw a picture, start x, start y, height, width, data...data...data...
CLS - clear the screen
CRE - draw an empty circle
CRF - draw a filled circle
ELE - draw an empty ellipse
ELF - draw a filled ellipseFCL - color to plot/print/draw in
LIN - draw a line
PGE - draw a polygon with X verticies
PGF - draw a polygon with X verticies and fill it
PIE - draw a filled arc like a slice of a pie
PLT - set a point
PRT - print
RCE - draw an empty rectangle
RCF - draw a filled rectangle
RST - init the LCD, same as power up
SCL - text scale
SD(x) - draw a vector based sprite to the screen
SL(x) - load a vector based 'sprite' to memory (as much memory as is leftover on the PIC)
SIZ - number of pixels in X & Y direction
TRD - send back touch screen coords (if any)

And spent a good 4-5 hours troubleshooting a port that was set to inputs vs. outputs...(where's the smiley that looks like me shooting myself in the foot?)
Got any ideas for any other commands?

 

[AtomSoft]

wow ill read this in a bit lots o commands!

 

[AtomSoft]

how about letting CLS take a color? So more like a FILL SCREEN... what if my background is normally black? or normally white?

I see BCL is that what that is? What about fore color?

 

[skimask87]

K, yep, forgot foreground color.
And added CLS takes an argument without changing foreground color.