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A project log for Standalone digital TDR (TDR-G3)

A third-gen fully digital standalone TDR built from common parts.

ms-bossMS-BOSS 07/01/2020 at 17:440 Comments

Hi,

it's been 3 weeks since my last post instead of a day as was planned. Sadly, I have nothing visually interesting to show. Right now, I am working on planning of the TDR-G3 along with somewhat more complicated user interface.

The user interface will have 7" 800x480 touch LCD. It will also have the usual set of knobs and buttons found on any oscilloscope / TDR / VNA or similar devices.

The UI board will include a STM32F429ZI microcontroller which supports external SDRAM and has peripheral for driving this kind of display, 16 MB SDRAM, 16 MB NOR FLASH and several conectors for connecting the knobs / buttons / measuring boards and power supply.

I have already tested a LVGL library which looks quite promising for GUI. It has fairly reasonable memory footprint, it's fast, looks good, can be reskinned fast (even on the fly) and responds well on touch. I tested it on a STM32F469 discovery kit because I don't have the F429 kit. I managed to update the example to v7.x LVGL and enable the DMA2D. It seems this will be the way to go. It works quite fast even on the 800x480 display.

Basic demo to show the widgets of LVGLIf you wish to look under my hands what I work currently on, I am writing all my research into a Gdrive document here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wSAv6nVDp5YyDHvm6opPSGBqKQ10VGIVKk0mVU0uyBA/edit?usp=sharing

The next step is to make the PCB for this UI board, then make the LVGL work on it with the screen I bought.

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