Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Gray scale LCD data transfer

The other day hackaday.com posted about Connor Taylor and others that uses a computer screen to transfer data to their micro controllers. I immediately thought, wow that is just so cool, no more cables for firmware updates. Just add a photo transistor to each project and you're done!
But the projects mentioned all suffer from the same problem: 60Hz refresh rate only gives you a few bits of data per second. Uploading just a few kb of data would take hours.
So after pondering this I thought why not use gray scale? The following is my proof of concept in the hope that someone will take it further and make it truly useful.

Saturday, April 30, 2011

uClinux on the LPC-E2468

The story...
Some time ago I was given an Olimex LPC-E2468 development board. My company bought it for a project but ended up not using it. A couple of weeks ago I finally got around to hooking it up and very soon understood why they didn't. The manual from Olimex basically says to run 'make config' and 'make', and you will have a kernel image to load onto the board. Sounds too easy to be true? You're right!

In this article I will try boil down more than a week of compiling, googling, recompiling, scrapping it all, compiling again, giving up, starting over... I will try explain the steps necessary to compile a working kernel and create a romfs image.