cheaper large instrument displays - mast mount

nigelmercier said:
Just signed up at Open Source Boat Electronics, it's a bit quiet! Perhaps nobody wants to be the first, so could I suggest a forum for introductions?

By the way Shaun, is that site going to cost you money? If so, I can offer free web hosting and a forum if you just register the domain. You can get an org.uk for £3.49 a year at 123-Reg.
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possibly get more eyeballs and traction to the project by keeping the discussion on this forum....
 
AngusMcDoon said:
I can do number one for a few pounds. I'll see if I can get round to making up an assembled kit next month when I have time.
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Do you want to give my new SeaTalk Interface a try?

SeaTalkIO.png
 
ShaunG said:
thanks for the link to gadget pool, i did'nt know about them. There seems to be a seatalk slant which is great for most (i have actively avoided raymarine because of seatalk) hours of fun reading :)
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Gadgetpool is run by Frank Wallenwein. He posts here occasionally. He is my arch-nemesis in DIY boat electronics. :D

He uses different processors to the ones I choose.
 
Love the idea of an arch nemesis...I guess I should call raymarine mine (their kit is good, just don't like being able to choose the best kit for the job..gutted they have now taken over Tacktick, guess it will soon be seatick as the comms protocol)

Nigel, thanks for the hosting offer, at the moment it's free, I guess if we ever manage to attract more interest then then there could be some costs, at the moment though I think we should be good :) thank you so much for the very kind offer
 
And I don't yet have an alliance...although the stm32 arm stuff is on my list, only cause I have a discovery board now :-) ( I did manage to fin my ardunio with a atmega128 on it, but never used it) whatever works for this project will probably be my future :-)
 
ShaunG said:
And I don't yet have an alliance...although the stm32 arm stuff is on my list, only cause I have a discovery board now :-) ( I did manage to fin my ardunio with a atmega128 on it, but never used it) whatever works for this project will probably be my future :-)
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If you go all Arduino I will get in a processor rivalry huff and add you to my deputy-nemesis list. :D
 
I think your safe from me being a nemesis...I am very sided towards the stm32...really looking forward to getting a touch better so that I might be able to understand some of the code for the mast repeater and try differing lcd's out :-)
 
Finally...I have a new stm32 discovery board (I stupidly ran over it with the Hoover at the weekend)

It seems to be an upgraded version with a m4 on it, a stm32f407vg to be precise. I have managed the blinking led demo on this board, after a bit of a head scratch, finally worked out the libraries are now called something else, not sure how I missed that one.


Any next steps...this is already feeling like a step into the unknown

A blinking light felt like the very first time I wrote a 10 print "hello world" at the age of 8....which was actually genuinely exciting
 
ShaunG said:
Finally...I have a new stm32 discovery board (I stupidly ran over it with the Hoover at the weekend)

It seems to be an upgraded version with a m4 on it, a stm32f407vg to be precise. I have managed the blinking led demo on this board, after a bit of a head scratch, finally worked out the libraries are now called something else, not sure how I missed that one.


Any next steps...this is already feeling like a step into the unknown

A blinking light felt like the very first time I wrote a 10 print "hello world" at the age of 8....which was actually genuinely exciting
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I've got one of those. The Coocox support for M4 based boards is less mature than the M3 ones (but getting better), and sometimes you have to do a bit of a manual fiddle when you have generated a project. It's all detailed on the Coocox forum.

This board and processor is fine for learning ARM Cortex programming, but this processor is not suitable for the mast display project. The reason is that it is way too powerful, over-featured, and the processor is not that cheap. Have a look at the processor price for the STM32F407VG. Last time I looked it was more expensive than a dev board with it on! Features like maths co-processor, audio support, USB host, external memory interface we aren't going to need.

A low end M3 will do the job for us.
 
ShaunG said:
Just ordered a stm32100rb from Farnell instead...any better?
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I guess you mean the STM32F100RB. I can't say definitively without trying that it is the best choice, but it's more like it. This one has 128k flash and 8k ram, which I would estimate as sufficient. Whether it has the performance for smooth display updates won't be known until it's tried. It has enough memory on chip to buffer the image and send the display update in one go, a technique which helps greatly.

I have one of these processors on a dev board and created a driver for a 128x64 mono LCD display a while ago, so I'll give it a go and see what it looks like.
 
e4d.jpg


Here's a driver for a 128x64 graphical monochrome LCD running on my STM32F100RB. It's might not be exactly the same hardware interface to the LCD as the display you are planning to use, but they are all pretty similar. This is using standard I/O pins to drive the display as this processor does not have dedicated LCD driver circuitry on chip. That's not a problem when using a low spec display like this one.

If anyone wants the source just PM me an email address.
 
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