shadow-clock VS picodvi

if you have a post in the middle you could illuminate it with leds and have the shadow be the hands https://github.com/dheera/shadow-clock

I used a Wemos D1 ESP8266 in this project [0]. Plenty good for the project at hand. I heard they have an ESP32 version now?

For one-off personal projects I'd probably still reach for a TinyPICO or FeatherS2 though because of the additional features they have, and that they have a Discord server you can ask questions to, but if you're deploying a dozen of them in your garden and want to save money then yeah, the Wemos would probably be a good bet. Support and documentation is a little sparse though, in comparison.

[0] https://github.com/dheera/shadow-clock

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.