Ordering…7 inch LCD using SSD1963 graphics board.

So I’ve decided that the regular Microchip development kit LCD touch screen it comes with is fine for watching results on but ultimately it stinks if I need to interact with the roaster at all.  The only way I’ll get away from this is to order a kit with a 7 inch LCD using SSD1963 graphics controllers.  Why?  One of the issues is really that I would need to interrupt the normal processing and switch control back and forth between various screens.  The PIC would then need to keep tracking the updates and logging them in the background but drawing anything I missed when I eventually go back to the other screen.  This would need to take place regardless if I did leave the screen during a roast but I’d rather keep an eye on everything while I’m changing things in a different portion of the roast control screens.

So to do this I’m attempting to use an SSD1963 graphic controller chip to squeeze a little bit more resolution out of things and going to send it to a 7″ touch screen module that I have on order.  I know there are plenty of projects out there that have demoed a 7 inch touch screen and other 640×480 and 800×480 LCD outputs driven by a PIC32.  MOST of them people keep trying to run video or turn the thing into a full resolution JPEG slideshow.

Everyone pretty much goes on and on about how a PIC32 can’t run much screen and it takes too much time to draw the screens.  Those that tend to say these things keep trying to get the PIC32 to stream video from somewhere which it is not the right kind of system to try that on.  When it involves only drawing graphs and buttons and text responses on the screen the system seems to run just fine in my opinion.  The way the graphics library seems to work these sort of updates are drawn in small sections.  It tells it to go to this position and draw text.  Go here and draw a line.  Go over there and put a dot.

My hope is that once I manage to convert a driver that works with the graphics library and get this thing up and running I can plan out which areas of the screen to update and find an acceptable balance and end up just spreading things out and enabling a few controls so that when I’m reviewing past information and configuring the upcoming roast it shows more resolution and then when it runs live it uses only what it can produce quickly on the screen.

I also think I need to start considering what sort of enclosure I need to use for mounting some prototype stuff into so I don’t have a pile of circuit boards spread out on the counter.  I’ll be needing to use some high voltage stuff soon so it’s safer to firmly mount connectors to a board and then safely mount a circuit board in a way that those ends won’t accidentally be bumped into.  I’m not sure where to begin with.  Obviously I’ll need to find something that I can purchase in single quantities.