PIC Based Picture Frame

Take a PIC 24HJ256GP206 processor and add a dash of knock-off touchscreen and a pinch of SD card compatibility for a DIY digital picture frame. [Daniel] wrote his own driver for the HX8347 controlled LCD that can achieve 15 FPS at 320×240 resolution with 16-bit color. As this was a gift for his wife, [Daniel] included a heart-shaped ring of LEDs that fade in and out like an electronic pulse. He notes that the JPEG decoder runs rather slow but that’s mostly because of the bottleneck caused when accessing data from the SD card. We’ve got more pictures and a link to the source code after the break.

Source Code

29 thoughts on “PIC Based Picture Frame

  1. Would anyone happen to know what model LCD that is?

    I’m working on my Senior project and I’d really like to be able to implement a nice color screen, but I can’t find one that interfaces with a PIC even remotely well.

  2. Crystalfontz has a 320×240 3.5″ with a relativly easy interface CFAF320240F-T for a bit over $50 – there’s even one with a touch screen interface for $54 that I’m doing a future project with – just get a sample of the AD7843 touch screen controller from Analog Devices.

  3. I hate LCDs :( Why? Because I can never get the bloody things to work. I have one lying right here on my desk just laughing at me. I must be retarded or something :(

  4. Some cheap graphic LCDs these days don’t come with the LCD drive voltage chips on them as a lot of them have gone obsolete. You end up having to create your own negative voltage or they just won’t work. If you see empty pads on the LCD’s pcb for a chip and some caps then chances are that’s the problem.

  5. Hey Daniel

    What method do you use to make your PCBs? Heat transfer/photolithography/etc ? Very well done with the SMD stuff.

    And a very lekker project overall ;) Good to see some ZA representation on HaD.

    d.

  6. I don’t know if any are still listening. I’m not even sure if Mike was the original developer. But, Mike, if you are… Regarding the limitations of the SDCard. Note, you can probably run your PIC 24F SPI bus at 8MHz. After that you should as least use Class 4 SDCards. Higher class cards didn’t buy me anything except they cost more. I was probably able to get something like 140KBytes/Second that way (don’t know the real speed because of other things going on in the loop). Test different SDCards if you don’t get at least that through put. It stinks, but I am suspicious some manufactures rank their cards by the 4 bit bus performance and let the SPI interface go to pot come development time. I have some Kingstons which test fast (probably over the 4 bit bus) but are suspiciously slow talking to my 24F over the SPI bus.

Leave a Reply

Please be kind and respectful to help make the comments section excellent. (Comment Policy)

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.