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EL display and RP2040

Playing around with an industrial monochrome EL display, experimenting with 1-bit rendering, dithering, Doom and TinyGL

michaelMichael
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By chance, I got myself an industrial ElectroLuminescent(EL) display. It is one bit per pixel monochrome with beautiful amber color (which looks bright yellow on camera) and has a resolution of 320x256.

I was wondering if I could put it to good use, so I started experimenting by driving it with a Raspberry Pi pico.
This project is mostly experiments with this EL display with intention of building something out of it - suggestions are welcome. I'm thinking of a ridiculously looking handheld console that can run Doom and other games.

Being inspired by this excellent article by Surma on image dithering, I started by adapting TinyGL (a well-known OpenGL 1.1-like software 3d graphics renderer) to run on a pico and to render 1-bit dithered images.

I managed make it run and ported some demos such as glxgears and Sproingies from Xscreensaver. Although, it needs a lot of optimization to run smoothly.

The other thing that I've tried so far, is to adapt Graham Sanderson's RP2040 Doom port. This worked out pretty well, I managed to get an acceptable image quality so the game is somewhat playable.

Here is an E1M1 speedrun:

video_2024-08-25_11-19-44.mp4

glxgears on Pico 2 (RP2350)

MPEG-4 Video - 3.40 MB - 08/25/2024 at 09:23

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  • 1 × LAEL320.256-6C EL display
  • 1 × Raspberry Pi pico (RP2040)

  • A quick test of Pico 2

    Michael • 08/25/2024 at 09:56 • 1 comment

    A Pico 2 (RP2350) runs glxgears at ~20 FPS without any overclocking. The same demo runs at about 12 FPS on an RP2040 overclocked to 270 MHz, and at about 5-6 FPS without overclocking.

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Chris Combs wrote 07/24/2024 at 03:46 • point

So cool!! Thanks very much for sharing this project!

I was inspired to get a couple of these displays too... one detail is eluding me, what voltage did you end up providing to the dc-dc input?  12v? Thanks for any advice you can offer!

  Are you sure? yes | no

Michael wrote 07/24/2024 at 13:44 • point

Yes it works from 12V DC, although I've found that it can be as low as 9V - it doesn't seem to affect performance.

  Are you sure? yes | no

Chris Combs wrote 07/24/2024 at 13:54 • point

Thank you so much!

  Are you sure? yes | no

Muth wrote 07/14/2024 at 09:38 • point

Nice project!

A long time ago I managed to get "2 grayscales" on a planar EL.320.240 by alternating two frame buffers at 100Hz, in addition to ordered dithering. But I used an fpga and an hdmi interface. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yBfuNI2T2Q

  Are you sure? yes | no

Michael Waiblinger wrote 07/10/2024 at 10:22 • point

Did you put Lena's hat on Freddy's head? Amazing, where is the source? Love the Display btw.

  Are you sure? yes | no

Michael wrote 07/10/2024 at 14:17 • point

It's "Ethically sourced Lena" - https://mortenhannemose.github.io/lena/

  Are you sure? yes | no

Michael Waiblinger wrote 07/10/2024 at 15:13 • point

Damn, I accidentally ... the whole rabbit hole, all at once.
But you must admit in low-res he really resembles Freddy here.

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Boris Bershadsky wrote 07/09/2024 at 13:26 • point

This looks incredible, where did you source your display? Looks like out of stock or discontinued. It would be cool to have an array of these for monitoring stocks

  Are you sure? yes | no

Michael wrote 07/09/2024 at 19:04 • point

I got it from ebay, from a Canadian seller. However, they listed it as a TFT LCD, which is not quite true, but I'm not complaining :)

  Are you sure? yes | no

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