We wish all displays would have the same pinout and our life would be much easier! This is made easier withe gadgeteer sockets but then you need 4 of them. We still want this top be user friendly, meaning it uses the very commend 0.1" headers. We picked the 2x20 connector because they are the cables used on old hard drives. You can still buy these everywhere online. Of course this is the connector we had used on FEZ Panda II and now on FEZ Panda III. But these products do not have a native parallel TFT display support, only SPI displays.
As there is still room for more signals, we have added UART, SPI and I2C as well to header, on top of the display signals and the resistive touch pins.
How can this be used? In many scenarios. We could create a display with this pinout to work on any single board computer with the same pinout. We could also make a gadgeteer socket to this pinout breakout. This way any gadgeteer display can be used with any single board computer with this pinout or the other way, any gadgeteer mainboard can be connected to any display with this pinout.
This may sound confusing but it will be clearer once we share the pinout and couple examples. Like a in a secret-panda-similar product but with a display capable header and, through a simple breakout, any gadgetter display can be used. Or grab any non-gadgeteer display and still be able to wire it and use it. We are all about giving you options :whistle:
Does the LCDCLK signal have a protective GND on each side of the ribbon cable header?
The reason I ask this is that I have another manufacturers board where they used a ribbon cable to connect the LCD and the LCDCLK has LCDVSYNC next to it and with a cable longer than about 120mm the LCD degrades badly.
For my own design using an FPC cable, I have a protective GND on either side of the clock and I can easily run a 200mm cable without any degradation in the display.
I’ve had to design an LVDS driver and receiver for the other board to get around the clock issue.
@ Brett. I’ve found that, as long as you have the wire in the ribbon cable itself with a GND on either side, it works well for slightly longer cables. I’ve even ran RGB at 33Mhz on 300mm FPC without any interference.
That was the idea behind the 80 conductor IDE cables where it added ground wires on each side.
Any Chance you could suggest this connector as an “Standard Gadgeteer connector for Displays” to the gadgeteer Team as an “RGB” socket?
Who says all modules must have the same 10 pin connector 8)
and, through a simple breakout, any gadgetter display can be used. Or grab any non-gadgeteer display and still be able to wire it and use it. We are all about giving you options :whistle: