Im starting to design an upgrade for a product that has human interaction, im not sure what route to go and what to choose, but id like to use TinyCLR and the G30 SoC.
Currently we have a double LED 7 segment display and a couple of physical buttons
this is obviously not good enough anymore because we cant show enough information and interaction is pretty analog and confusing, also we have issues on the mechanical side with the buttons.
What i was thinking was at least a 16x2 alphanumeric LCD and a custom membrane keyboard with LED indication like this:
or an TFT LCD at least 5" with touch, and then i don’t need anything else (buttons, keyboards etc.) but im not sure what is supported with TinyCLR and how hard it is to design an interface.
Can anyone give me advice and some pointers?? if i choose TFT LCD what interface to choose, which controller etc. If there is a already made library or some documentation on a particular setup, id base my design on top of that.
for buttons you can reduct all those pins to 3 only (gnd,vcc,analog read by creating an interface with some resistors to reduct usage of all those pins)
you will get more pins on mcu and short way to manage buttons (based on analog read values only)
since G30 (is stm32f401) have no enought memory for touchschreen (even if you not use touch because of lot of pixels) based on my experience you at least for screen use ssd1306 oled
i just give advice for G30 so otherwise you should choose (G80 or G120E) if you want to get working touch screen.
I concur. The G30 has been great working with for the past couple of years, but if there is one thing it lacks that is memory.
I do haptics. Reserving ~2Kb to store my Haptic Waveforms was probably the hardest part. And those don’t even change. I haven’t done nice displays before but I imagine you keep a few buffers lying around so you can draw quickly. G30 may be suited for this only if you are very careful and exact with your memory usage. Or it simply may not work.
You will definitely make things easier for yourself by grabbing more RAM.
G30 with graphics works but you won’t get the full experience. A small display with basic functionality is fine. Like when using the a 1.8" display shield with FEZ. Or the display we have on the G30 Dev board.
Have a look at the Nextion displays or any of the ones using the FTDI EVE chipset or 4DSystems have some very nice options, but a bit expensive compared to the likes of the Nextion. You can choose various sizes to suit your project.
Either of those can generate graphics with no support from the G30 graphics wise. The G30 simply talks to them over SPI or UART and reads touch and can send data to the display. You do all the development with an IDE and upload to the LCD.
Those do graphics but it is not .NET and you are not using the built in font support we have in for example. By the time you are adding the cost of all these additions, just get a G120 and then pick any display of your liking and use it any way you like
