my obscure/weird displays

[marshallh]

First one is a Planar 512x256 electroluminescent display.

By sending it a 50% alternating XOR pattern I could see the burnin pretty easily. It came out of some sort of optical insepection rig.



100 and -100v flybacks, for row/columns. The drivers are by NEC, which are very similar to SUpertex serial in, parallel out HV shift regs.
There is a NEC asic directing the incoming bitstream.

Driving it with a Cyclone III here. This is the sort of thing that's trivial on fpga but impossible with a cpu.

It is a very bright orange when lit. It is kinda like a warm OLED.


And error diffusion


It's actually very meaty, about 10 inches long. Very thin actually. Was going to put it in my car but it's way too big.

more later

[veryevil]

I've got a couple of similar Planar displays. They are awesome! However I drive mine with a single PIC32 chip. No problem when using DMA.

[marshallh]

Thanks, next one is jsut a vanilla IEE vfd, nothing special. It does support several interfaces (intel bus, hd44780, etc)




Next is a huge 20x1 VFD sign module



It runs on a motorola 6800 with 48K of ram.
Click here for bigger
http://img36.imageshack.us/img36/5610/img2036eg.jpg

[poodyp]

I like the graphic of the SCA, very relevant this week. Is that their official badge or something?

That seems like a lot of stuff for just a 1x20 display, does the 6800 do anything other than run the display?

This display talk makes me want to find my 2x20 VFD.