Topic: Larger LCD?

I could only find one previous message asking about the use of a larger LCD and that wrt the OLPC screen. Since the video hardware is rated for an 800*600 display I'm wondering if anyone knows of a suitable unit that can support or provide the touchscreen?

I'm thinking chumby board, 800* 600 display, new box, li-poly battery, Squeak...

Re: Larger LCD?

Crikey. Nobody else interested in a Chumby Maximus? I'm stunned.

Re: Larger LCD?

I think you got it. A chumby with bigger screen (Mx21 does support svga but with very sloppy performance), batteries , bigger box etc... is not a Chumby anymore!
Or are you looking for a cheaper nokia webtablet? smile Or a UMPC itself?
We are talking about overlaps with already established products, something that a startup like chumby industries has wisely chose to avoid!!!

What about shipping the thing to italy guys???

Re: Larger LCD?

Would love to be able to ship to Europe but we don't have the certifications yet to go there--or the regionalization or customer support resources that speak Italian :-) There's also the issue of latency to our servers--since chumby gets widget feeds, the performance from Europe is less than stellar due to the latency of crossing the ocean. We'd need a local regional server to make it a really tight experience.

Someday, we'll get there...

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Re: Larger LCD?

mancio wrote:

I think you got it. A chumby with bigger screen (Mx21 does support svga but with very sloppy performance), batteries , bigger box etc... is not a Chumby anymore!

Well that's not very much in the spirit of hacking the hardware, now is it? :-) Putting some 'Hello Kitty' stickers on is ok but a bigger LCD is not? Surely you're not serious...

Re: Larger LCD?

It's not about if it's "okay" or not, it's just an incredibly hard thing to do. Chumby was more-or-less designed to use the LCD it shipped with. LCDs have all kinds of different interfaces, different wiring, different color depth. If you wanted to do this, you'd have to build some kind of shim between the Chumby board and the new LCD that somehow reformatted the signal so it would work, or you'd have to find a larger LCD that has exactly the same interface as Chumby's LCD. Neither of those things is that easy to do.

So if you want to, go for it. They've released the schematics, so everything you need is there for you. Now it's your turn, go out and find a new LCD and work out how to interface it with Chumby's board.

Re: Larger LCD?

rowledge wrote:
mancio wrote:

I think you got it. A chumby with bigger screen (Mx21 does support svga but with very sloppy performance), batteries , bigger box etc... is not a Chumby anymore!

Well that's not very much in the spirit of hacking the hardware, now is it? :-) Putting some 'Hello Kitty' stickers on is ok but a bigger LCD is not? Surely you're not serious...

I have a design, based on an MX21, that use a WVGA 7" display. If you can connect this display to the MX21 (and it's simpler than the one used on the chumby but involves soldering 40 wires to a 05.mm pitch connector) don't expect much more that a rather static UI, colorful as you want, but do forget movies and the like. The SDRAM is shared and moving lots of data between the framebuffer and the display, even through DMA, is really going to hog down the system. You can make a simple calculation by reading the MX21 manual, LCDC chapter but you won't like the result!
I had to slow down to the limit of flicker the refresh rate.
If you are going, for example, to use a VGA SHARP display the modification that you have to do to the kernel driver are very few (starting from the freescale ADS BSP).

So, to sum up, from an hacker perspective is correct to add whatever you want to the cumby (but I stress the fact that a clever hack make reasonable good use of the device's form factor) but from a commercial/industrial point of view, i would switch to other devices to obtain what you want!
Anyway, Hello kitty smiling at you in 800*480 is not bad AT ALL! smile

Re: Larger LCD?

bunnie wrote:

Someday, we'll get there...

well... in the meantime, for a 'test/prototype/euro' chumby I could translate the manual in italian!

;-)