Hi all,
I was wondering if you considered putting a higher end MCU on the AVR-TLCD-128CAN board? I initially saw this board, and became very interested when I learned it had a monochrome 160x160px LCD touchscreen.
This sounded great for a project I had in mind – basically I’m looking at interfacing one of my amateur radios ([Yaesu FT-897D) to the touch screen to provide a DTMF keypad and remote control for mobile use… in my case, bicycle mobile use… the radio would be on the back of the bike with the MCU touchscreen on the handlebars, allowing me to see/change frequencies, and using the SD-card to store knowledge of repeaters, IRLP nodes and Echolink nodes. I was also tossing up the idea of adding in a GPS receiver to provide APRS tracker functionality. (see [this site for an idea of what APRS does).
Anyway… some research… this MCU looked almost perfect. It had a CAN port which, okay, not immediately useful, guess it didn’t hurt. It had the SD card slot which could store the data needed. All I needed was a means to generate DTMF tones (PWM, frequency synthesizers… a few options there), and to be able to link one of the RS232 ports to the transceiver – as both use 3.3V I should even get away without the level shifter.
What was the deal breaker? The AT90CAN128 has 4KB of RAM. This didn’t sound too bad, until I read a comment that the framebuffer needed occupied almost all of that 4KB. And indeed… you multiply 160x160, and divide by 8 to get the number of bytes… you get a figure 3.2KB. I had assumed video was on off-chip memory (within the LCD controller itself)… but it seems the LCD panel is just a plain panel with the framebuffer residing within the AVR MCU’s RAM.
Has there been any thought to provide a similar board/kit with a higher-end MCU? (Perhaps even an ARM like the AT91SAM7S256?) Or am I mistaken about the LCD panel?
Regards,](http://www.aprs.fi)](RigPix Database - Yaesu - FT-897D)