picodvi VS pico-playground

The RP2040 is a great MCU for playing with graphics as it can bit bang VGA and DVI/HDMI. There's some info on the DVI here: https://github.com/Wren6991/PicoDVI

I wrote a couple of articles on how to do bit banged VGA on the RP2040 from scratch: https://gregchadwick.co.uk/blog/playing-with-the-pico-pt5/ and https://gregchadwick.co.uk/blog/playing-with-the-pico-pt6/ plus an intro to PIO https://gregchadwick.co.uk/blog/playing-with-the-pico-pt4/

A few years back someone was bit banging DVI and 720p 30fps video straight off the RP2040 GPIO pins with just inline resistors between not and the HDMI cable.

https://github.com/Wren6991/PicoDVI

I have the Adafruit DVI board and have been hacking on it some. It's more fun than should be allowed.

There's a project to get this running using Rust[1]. Currently it outputs the blue channel with sync, but has trouble with the other two channels. I don't have a hardware lab with scope, logic analyzer, etc., so it's not easy for me to debug.

In the meantime, I've been doing some experiments in the C codebase as well[2], mostly in the direction of proportionally spaced bitmap text, using the fonts in the X11 distribution.

[1]: https://github.com/DusterTheFirst/pico-dvi-rs

[2]: https://github.com/Wren6991/PicoDVI/pull/48

There is even bit-banged DVI library for pico.

Apparently, there is a digital video output project for the RP2040 already out there [0]! As for why digital video is more rare, it is because the common digital video formats are higher bandwidth and require higher signal integrity.

[0] https://github.com/Wren6991/PicoDVI

I've seen people implement DVI with PIO, and I'm sure basic missile commands wouldn't be as bandwidth-intensive as that.

For example this guy (https://github.com/Wren6991/PicoDVI) essentially 'bit bangs' CML. Sure its not a completely compliant implementation, but it's pretty close... In his case using a push pull with 3.3V/0V. I don't know how he's getting a 0.8V swing.

The RP2040 (as used by the Raspberry Pi Pico) can generate some impressive video thanks to its PIO. E.g. Luke Wren's work giving DVI output https://github.com/Wren6991/picodvi and the scanvideo library: https://github.com/raspberrypi/pico-playground

I did a write up going over how to generate VGA video from scratch to produce some SNES like graphics:

https://gregchadwick.co.uk/blog/playing-with-the-pico-pt4/

The example sketch you can use without any modifications nessasory

https://github.com/raspberrypi/pico-playground https://github.com/raspberrypi/pico-examples

I used the USB sound card example: https://github.com/raspberrypi/pico-playground/blob/master/apps/usb_sound_card

You'll need to edit this file after you download it first. Add the lines PICO_AUDIO_I2S_DATA_PIN=28 and PICO_AUDIO_I2S_CLOCK_PIN_BASE=26 in the compile definitions. After that, you can compile it as normal.