Hi All
A new service pack (in fact an official release of the complete LPC2xxx project) is waiting in the wings, so it is time to mention a few details.
The single project includes support for all devices from LPC2101 up to the LPC2478. Support of the LPC24xx is new, although not basically that different from the LPC23XX at the driver level. What I do like about this is the breadth of the chip's compatibility. The demo project will compile a wide variety of features up to TFT display (see below for more details) when configured for the LPC2478FBD208, but will still compile for the baby in the family (LPC2101), with of course a few less features. This makes it so easy to chose one of the chips which is optimal for a certain application and immediately start running the code on it.
The most interesting about the new member, the LPC24xx, is that some of the devices include LCD controller. Together with its SDRAM controller and external interface, quality graphics and display based control becomes very easy to work with. The uTasker simulator is ready to allow complete simulation of this and makes development even easier and more fun.
To whet your appetites, check out the new simulator screen shots with graphical LCD/TFT support at
http://www.utasker.com/Demos/Simulations.html Also the LPC2478 is online at the moment at
http://demo.utasker.com The demo contains a TFT page which displays the present screen image (this uses dynamic content generation and builds a BMP from the image and sends it to the web browser - the code size to do this is in fact about 25 lines - including comments! It was developed in the simulator and worked first time on the target - as one would expect ;-)
It also allows posting new images to the board (a sort of LCD picture frame which can be updated by anyone via the Internet). Note that the Ethernet reliability is not 100% as discussed here:
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/lpc2000/message/42719 It is hoped that the reason can be identified very shortly (there may be a HW problem with the board (?)).
But this leads also to a general question. What about LCD support in the project? This has been looked at with a lot of experimental work during the last couple of months and the next SPs will in fact all contain monochrome graphic LCD support (via parallel port) with font and image capabilities. Furthermore SPI based controls and color graphical LCDs will also become supported as standard (but not necessarily in the next SP) . The new LPC2XXX package will be a bit of an exception due to its TFT support but this is more due to the fact that it would be a shame to run code on the LPC2478 board without being able to use the great display. Graphic libraries will however be missing in this version.
So what about graphic libraries? Well the first thing to say is that the actual control technique is rather different for various LCD types. A chip with inbuilt LCD controller is in fact the easiest to work with but the images are quite big (several hundred kByte is easily possible) which is not always practical to backup in SRAM! Mono-chrom LCDs need maybe 1k and so intermediate buffer techniques are interesting. This does however make things more difficult to standardize. What one finds is that there are usually graphics libraries supplied by the semiconductor manufacturers too. These are however restricted to use in projects with the specific chips and not compatible between each supplier. They can be used but don't allow flexibility in moving to other chips and projects, so this is a reason why a uTasker graphics library will also be added over time. The big advantage of the uTasker project being also that all work is much easier in the simulator - whether using a manufacturer's library or ultimately the uTasker graphics library the simulator will make life easier during real development.
Regards
Mark
PS. The LPC24XX is a big chip. However the demo project (as online) occupies about 64k program code pace and uses (only) around 20k of the available 96k SRAM!
