Picaso Embedded Graphics Processor

SKU: COM-15989 Brand: Sparkfun

Retired Product

Replaced by: Embedded Graphics Processor

This product has been replaced by: Embedded Graphics Processor
This product is no longer available. This page is only for reference.

The PICASO is a custom embedded 4DGL graphics controller designed to interface with many popular OLED and LCD display panels. Powerful graphics, text, image, animation and countless more features are built right inside the chip. It offers a simple plug-n-play interface to many 16-bit 80-Series colour LCD and OLED displays.

The chip is designed to work with minimal design effort and all of the data and control signals are provided by the chip to interface directly to the display. Simply choose your display and interface it to the PICASO on your application board. This offers enormous advantage to the designer in development time and cost saving and takes away all of the burden of low level design.

The PICASO belongs to a family of processors powered by a highly optimised soft core virtual engine, E.V.E. (Extensible Virtual Engine). EVE is a proprietary, high performance virtual processor with an extensive byte-code instruction set optimised to execute compiled 4DGL programs. 4DGL (4D Graphics Language) was specifically developed from ground up for the EVE engine core. It is a high level language which is easy to learn and simple to understand yet powerful enough to tackle many embedded graphics applications.

The device offers modest but comprehensive I/O features and can interface to I2C, serial, digital, buttons, joystick and many more. Provision is also made for a dedicated PWM audio output that supports audio WAV files and complex sound generation. A basic system font is included, and unlimited customisable fonts with fixed or proportional spacing can be created using the 4D Workshop 4 IDE. All of the display built-in driver libraries implement and share the same high-level function interface. This allows your GUI application to be portable to different display controller types.

The 4D Workshop4 IDE is FREE and there is no licensing requirement.

Features

Low-cost OLED, LCD and TFT display graphics user interface solution.
Ideal as a standalone embedded graphics processor or interface to any host controller as a graphics co-processor.
Connect to any colour display that supports an 80-Series 16 bit wide CPU interface. All data and control signals are provided.
Built in high performance virtual processor core (EVE) with an extensive byte-code instruction set optimised for 4DGL, the high level 4D Graphics Language.
Comprehensive set of built in graphics and multimedia services.
Display full colour images, animations, icons and video clips.
15K bytes of flash memory for user code storage and 14K bytes of SRAM for user variables.
13 Digital I/O pins.
I2C interface (Master).
D0…D15, RD, WR, RS, CS – dedicated display interface pins.
FAT16 file services.
2 Asynchronous hardware serial ports with Auto-Baud feature.
SPI interface support for SDHC/SD memory card for multimedia storage and data logging purposes (uSD with up to 2GB and SDHC memory cards starting from 4GB and above).
4-Wire resistive touch panel interface.
Audio support for wave files and complex sound generation with a dedicated 16-bit PWM audio output.
8 x 16 bit timers with 1 millisecond resolution.
Single 3.3 Volt Supply @25mA typical.

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