[Coco] What if the next CoCo is made into aTablet?

[John Kent]

I'm sorry I keep forgetting to remove the SPAM message from the Subject 
heading when I reply to emails.
It's due to the Kaspersky spam file. There are 27 days left on the 
license and I might go to Norton when it expires.
I've disabled the spam message so hopefully it won't be a problem now.

John.

On 12/07/2011 5:43 PM, John Kent wrote:
> 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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