[Coco] [!! SPAM] Re: What if the next CoCo is made into a Tablet?

[John Kent]

I bought two 800 x 600 pixel LCD display panels from Rockby here in 
Australia a few years ago with the idea of hooking them up to an FPGA 
board but they need special connector to wire up the video. There have 3 
x 5 (8?) bit RGB input pins. It might be a bit clunky, but if the FPGA 
board was fairly low profile like the spartan 3 starter board it could 
be mounted on the back of the LCD display.

The display has a 20W back light with 12V inverter circuit. You might be 
hard pressed running it off battery, but if you were prepared to have a 
wall wart power supply rather than batteries it would be OK.

The only issue is the touch sensitive display. There are small 3" x 4" 
LCD displays available from Terasic for the De1 & De2 boards which have 
touch sensors on them but they are a bit small. Touch sensitive full 
size monitors are fairly expensive. I don't know if you could by add on 
LED beam sensors. You could perhaps use the PS/2 mouse/keyboard 
interface to talk to it. you'd have to have a touch sensitive keyboard 
as well some how.

The upshot is, that if you were prepared to compromise on a few things, 
it wouldn't be hard to build your own hardware.
It wouldn't be nearly as slick as the Apple iPad, but it's doable. Maybe 
you could hook the FPGA board up to a beagle board or similar via the 
serial port to provide ethernet, wireless ?, USB via drivewire etc.

There is the issue of the applications that make use of the touch 
display. You'd have to have a separate bit of touch sensitive hardware 
that converted the display position into strings or key strokes that 
were interpretable by the program. That would also be dependent on the 
program and screen you were displaying, so it might not be so much the 
hardware that is difficult, but getting the software going.

Alternatively write a CoCo emulator app for the iPad.

John.

On 12/07/2011 1:08 PM, Mark McDougall wrote:
> On 12/07/2011 12:43 PM, Aaron Wolfe wrote:
>
>> I will gladly arrange for this tablet to be produced, and even do some
>> of the work myself.
>
> Count me in too Aaron!
>
> Regards,
>

-- 
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