Parallella LCD Board + Android

[mgielda]

Hi everyone,

We have just finished the design for a Parallella daugther board with an LCD connector so that the board can be turned into a standalone SBC with a small screen, without the need for a monitor and HDMI support in the FPGA bitstream. As you can see we have also added some useful connectors which we found necessary for day to day Parallella work. The board will be released as open hardware in the coming days, but we wanted to give you a sneak peak preview of the visualisations since they are already there. The board is designed in Altium, we will share the schematics and BoM on github.

The first PCBs just arrived today, we will solder the board and confirm that it works very soon.

Here goes the visualisations:

1.png (265.83 KiB) Viewed 34751 times

2.png (118.99 KiB) Viewed 34751 times

3.png (274.28 KiB) Viewed 34751 times

The LCD board allows Parallella to run Linux with graphics, using a simple GPU IPcore and a proper Linux driver (including e.g. LCD dimming) which we also made.

All this will be open sourced in the nearest future.

Another piece of good news is that all this infrastructure will allow us to release a decently behaving Android for Parallella, which we have been baking in the background.

[9600]

That is super cool. Will you be selling these? I can't wait to get one!

Cheers,

Andrew

[ZenoArrow]

Great idea for a board, will be glad to see it in action.

[mgielda]

[AndyC]

I'm very interested i one of these, will you be selling them?

[mgielda]

[AndyC]

Hi Michael,

Thanks very much for the reply.

Next time I'm in Poland I will drop in

Cheers

Andy

[mgielda]

Hi!

In the meantime, we have managed to assemble the board, now awaiting field testing. Stay tuned!

LCD board w/o Parallella

view_assembly.JPG (470.51 KiB) Viewed 33958 times

LCD board with Parallella

view_with_parallella.JPG (538.61 KiB) Viewed 33958 times

Cheers,
Michael

[AndyC]

Looking good!

[adexmont]

just a consideration from a non addicted to work: with this board you are closing the access to the north and south connector of the epiphany (that in my dreams may be used to connect a 4096 epiphany cores chip as expansion "hope this happen in a few years ").

Because you are using only 2 connector, isn't better to have the board that end in the middle of the parallella board and maybe come out on the ethernet side ?

Another curiosity is the estimated performance... if i get right this expansion board is provided with a basic gpu... which one? will be gpu opensource?

will the board provide the inverter and the power for the backlight of the lcd panel or just the lvds signal ?

Thanks for answering this maybe not so smart question.
I was trying to get lcd panel working with an already opensource board but ther's no gpu just a translation from hdmi to lvds from chalkboard... I don't know if you may find something interesting in theyre products and datasheet.
At the moment i wasn't able to get it run cause some adapter incompatibility.

Hope to not been too much OT
thanks for your work.

EDIT:
just another thought about lcd... i´m troubleshooting (with no success at the moment) an lcd panel with touch interface, does your board support touch option or just bring out the gpio from the pboard ?