Arduino Uno R3 graphics accelerator shield uses no pins

Hello and welcome to another in my series of unique hardware projects designed to bring you something useful that you’ve hopefully never seen before and at a price point that any hobbyist can afford. This project brings together the knowledge that I’ve gained over the last few years to bring you a graphics accelerator for the Arduino Uno R3 based on an ARM Cortex M0 core attached to a 640×360 LCD from the Sony U5 Vivaz cellphone. In previous articles you’ve seen how I’ve reverse engineered the Sony LCD and then used it in reflow oven and FPGA graphics accelerator projects. Introduction TFT LCD shields for the...

An FPGA sprite graphics accelerator with a 180MHz STM32F429 controller and 640 x 360 LCD

A very warm welcome to my most ambitious project to date. In this project I’m going to attempt to design and build a sprite-based graphics accelerator that will function as a co-processor to an MCU. Using cheap off-the-shelf components I’m hoping to achieve a level of gaming performance that compares well to popular commercial hand-held gaming consoles. I’m hoping that I’ll learn a few new tricks along the way, and, if the ideas currently zinging around inside my head all land the right way up and in the right order then I should be able to write a demo or two, maybe even a small game as a proof of concept. Naturally...

Reverse engineering the Nokia E73 QVGA LCD

Readers with a keen memory will no doubt recall that I said that the N93 would probably be the last of the Nokia QVGA LCDs that I attempt to reverse engineer. However probably is not definitely and one day whilst browsing ebay my finger slipped and next thing I knew I’d got myself an...

Generic Nokia LCD hacking board Feb24

Generic Nokia LCD hacking board

Over the course of the last few months I’ve been presenting schematics and PCBs that you can use to attach various Nokia LCDs to popular microcontrollers. Today I’m going to go one step further and present the generic board that I use for hacking any Nokia LCD that happens to have...

Reverse engineering the Nokia N93 QVGA LCD

Welcome to what will probably be the last in the series of articles in which I reverse engineer one of the Nokia QVGA cellphone displays from the pre-smartphone era. I think that by now I’ve covered every possible aspect of these incredibly cost effective little displays and hopefully...