VGA Video Output With An ATtiny

vga_video_attiny

[Fernando] is working on creating a game at home, with live scoring displayed on a large LCD TV. He’s keeping mum as to what the game entails, but he was more than happy to spill the details on how he planned to use the television as a wireless scoreboard.

The writeup is the first part in what will likely be a substantial series of progress reports, covering how he used an ATtiny45 to drive his LCD display. Eventually, the scoreboard will use a Bluetooth adapter for wireless input, but his immediate goal was to get the display running properly.

He explains how he uses the tiny micro and its limited set of I/O pins to drive the display, dipping into some of the technical details along the way. He discusses how he worked out the timings of the VSYNC and HSYNC pulsing, as well as how how the characters are actually drawn on the screen.

The article isn’t overly heavy on the technical details, and he has sample code available so you can take a look at how the VGA magic was done, so be sure to check it out.

5 thoughts on “VGA Video Output With An ATtiny

  1. At last, a use for some of my otherwise useless 15″ LCD panels.

    Replace CCFL backlight with LED strip from more modern screen, and make a scoreboard/digital picture frame/etc.

    I came up with the idea of recording the drive signals for all possible number combinations from a single working board then playing them back using a fast serial memory ie 23K256 and an AVR etc.

    1. Most LED monitors have LED strips on the side, and then a special material attached to the rear of the screen to diffuse it across the screen, it’s not simply a matter of putting some LED behind an LCD because then you just get a ridiculous blotchy screen, it needs to be very uniformly diffused, but still be bright enough after that.
      On the other hand – for a simple clock that might not matter though.

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