VideoOut Module for larger displays e.g. 1920 x 1080

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1

Hi guys,

Is there some way to connect a monitor with higher resolutions to FEZ Spider?
I noticed this module http://www.ghielectronics.com/catalog/product/356
However, this module goes to 800 x 600 max.
I would like to connect a large monitor/TV to my spider

TIA Jos

2

The bandwidth and memory requirements are way too high…

A 1920 x 1080 display with 24 bit color running at 30 frames per second needs 186MB of screen data per second.

3

What would then be the way to go in order to increase resolution
Would it be possible to go to e.g. 1280 x 800?

4

@ JdV - Definitively it is not the target for NETMF !

5

If you really need to talk to a high quality big TV like that, how about using a Raspberry Pi as a proxy to handle your UI? It’s got an HDMI out, supports 1080P, and is now only $25 (plus tax & shipping) for the newly-released Model A which doesn’t have an ethernet port and uses about a third of the current of the model B. You could communicate between the Spider and the Pi by passing simple command messages over UART or SPI or I2C, implement any nice user interface stuff at the Pi’s side in Python or your preferred language, and implement the hardware module control at the Spider side.

For example (simple case) - let’s say you’ve got a Spider hooked to some sensors, e.g. weather stuff like temperature and pressure, and you want to see that in a nice GUI on a big screen. You can wire up your modules to the Spider and set up some timer to poll your sensor data as normal, but instead of using the Spider’s graphics capabilities you’d just turn that sensor data into parseable strings to go out as serial data, and push them out via an SPI interface to an Extender module. This would be wired to the corresponding SPI pins on the Pi, which would be running a Python program listening for input at the SPI pins, receives the data from the Spider as a string, parses the string to obtain the sensor data, and updates a nice display with maybe current values and a rolling graph.

Admittedly this model of doing things is more complicated than doing everything in the Spider instead, but on the positive side it would allow you to tap into a lot of capability for a very low price - could do a similar trick to use Raspberry Pi as a proxy for SD storage, network access, image processing etc.

6

Yes, or also a Beaglebone+WEC7 if you want to stay on Microsoft Environnment…

7

Thanks guys, for all your info.
This certainly helped!