Hey everybody,
This is Terry from Hitt Consulting.
I want to thank Spark Fun for carrying my products.
I will be lurking on the forums if anyone has any questions about them. I’ll try to check in at least once a day.
I mainly use the Scenix/Ubicom/Parallax SX chips in assembly and SX/B (basic). And also the Basic Stamps. I will try to help for any microcontroller as much as I can.
Terry Hitt
Hitt Consulting
Welcome to the forum!
Your overlay module implementation looks pretty clever. Am I safe in guessing the the controller syncs to the HSYNC and VSYNC then overrides the input signal forcing it to black or white depending on what needs to be displayed?
Is there enough horsepower in the SX to implement basic color?
-Bill
Bill,
Yes, it uses the LM1881 to get “in sync” with the video signal.
It will also generate the video text if there is not a video input.
Color is a whole lot harder to do. The modules would be too expensive for the hobbiest. And that is who I support.
I wish when color TV was invented they would have just scrapped the B/W standard. Color is really a kludge on top of the existing black and white standard (so the existing black and white TV’s could show the color broadcasts).
Terry Hitt
Hitt Consulting
Hitt Consulting:
Color is a whole lot harder to do. The modules would be too expensive for the hobbiest. And that is who I support.
That’s what I figured. A while back I looked into generating characters and simple sprites on a TV and lots of research later I ended up driving a VGA monitor with an FPGA.
-Bill
Isn’t the government actually trying to ditch the whole analog TV system by a certain year? I think I heard by 2010? So everything with be HDTV. I wonder how hard that is for hobbists to use. Have either of you guys, or anyone else, taken a crack at it yet?
(Sorry if this is a little off topic, it just got me thinking about it.)
I saw a project to make an ATSC transmitter with an FPGA. It looked reasonably doable. On the other hand, that’s just a matter of getting the bits onto the air — you still need to generate an MPEG stream smehow.
I would think generating componet (not composite) video would be fairly doable. But I haven’t looked into it, so maybe I’m talkin’ out my butt.
Terry