Neek and lcd panel

Question

First of all let me point out that I am a total beginner to Altera, Nios and FPGA in general. I have a NEEK board and for a uni project I need to implement a system that performs an FFT on a number of points, say 1024 that are stored on a memory somewhere (I have written that part in C as a standalone program). Putting aside speed and other considerations, how can I proceed to display some text or calculations on the included LCD panel on the daughterboard? I am trying to look for the simplest solution for now and then eventually make it more complex.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks!

altera_forum · Answer

I would take a look at the C2H Mandelbrot design, it displays frames/second on the screen and some other stuff. It uses the SGDMA to pump frames into a video pipeline then out to the screen.

You could also give this a shot: http://www.alterawiki.com/wiki/modular_sgdma_video_frame_buffer

This design only draws coloured boxes on the screen but if you can figure out a way to map characters to pixels then this design should be a lot easier to use. For example if you wanted to draw the letter "I" to the screen you would use a bitmap like this:

0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0

0x0, 0x1, 0x1, 0x1, 0x1, 0x1, 0x0

0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x1, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0

0x0, 0x1, 0x1, 0x1, 0x1, 0x1, 0x0

0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0, 0x0

(0x0 means black, 0x1 means white.... it would actually be 0x00000000, 0x00FFFFFF for this particular hardware). This would be a pain to do for all the characters so I recommend using tools for this sort of thing: http://www.iseasoft.com/bitfontcreatorpro.htm (I searched for "font bitmap C header" and found that near the top of the list).

altera_forum · Answer

Thanks a lot for your help! I will look into it more.

However, is there no "automated" process of doing this included with the Altera Quartus software or Eclipse? Even if i implement the uC/OS-II is there still no kind of display driver to automatically do a printf without passing through bitmapping? Again, I'm sorry if a lot of these questions are reduntant/silly.

altera_forum · Answer

I don't know of one for uC/OSII but I think I saw a sample of using uClinux with the same video pipeline as the NEEK designs.  I don't recall if it output to the LCD or to the VGA port though.  I think it's on this page somewhere:  http://www.alterawiki.com/wiki/uclinux

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Neek and lcd panel

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