Need an 800x600 cockpit pda/tablet!

[Ben Jackson]

I've been playing with the PDF approach plates. Well rendered they are
easily readable at 600x800 (they're taller than they are wide, but
narrower than the 4:3 aspect ratio of most display) with 16 levels of
grayscale. 480x640 is pretty good with 16 levels of gray, down to right
on the ragged edge of usable with only 4 levels.

The device doesn't need that much storage. A largish compact flash card
should hold all of the pages on the entire DVD if they're pre-rendered
(a GIF of the plate is much smaller and displays much faster).

What it does need is a reasonably large screen, probably at least 6"
diagonal. There are some 480x640 PDAs, but they have very small screens.
There are tons of 240x320 PDAs but I don't think they'd ever be suitable
for viewing plates.

I'd rather avoid a laptop or even a full tablet PC (stuff with 10"+ screens)
in favor of an ebook/pda sort of form factor.

--
Ben Jackson
>
http://www.ben.com/

[Ross Oliver]

Ben Jackson > wrote:
>I'd rather avoid a laptop or even a full tablet PC (stuff with 10"+ screens)
>in favor of an ebook/pda sort of form factor.


EarthLCD (www.earthlcd.com) is offering a 6.3" 640x480 grayscale
LCD display panel for the bargain price of $29 (search for EG9013FNZ1)
From the spec sheet, it doesn't look all that difficult to drive. If your
gizmo doesn't have to *do* anything other than display GIFs from a CF card,
you could probably run it using fairly simple FPGA. How's your Verilog? ;-)
Sure would be a lot less power-hungry (and therefore cooler) than a
tablet PC. The only wrinkle would be getting the +40 volt driver voltage.

If you're not into hacking hardware, EarthLCD also sells its mARMmalade [sic]
kit: Modular ARM Application LCD Appliance Device Electronics. This
is an ARM-based single-board computer running Linux, and a 7.8" color
LCD touch-screen display, all for $299. Just add power.


Happy hacking,
Ross Oliver