VGA/TV display on Raspberry Pico

Hello Mr. Miroslav Nemecek, Thank you for this wonderful gift. I am making a GUI console for my hobby project with it. However, I have a few questions.

1. Is it possible to use the hardware timer (for the tachometer function)?
2. How to utilize the audio out pin for another purpose?
3. Is it possible to use DrawTextBg and Text printing with PrintText can be used on the same canvas at the same time? which example to follow?
4. How to use UART0 at GP12,13, I2C0 on GP20,21 (for DS3231 RTC) and SPI0 on GP16,17,18,19 (for microSD card)? Thanks & Regards, Sourav

I've been trying to use ScreenSegmAText but it appears to crash PicoVGA.

I've tried with a few simple programs without luck.

As as test, I modified the matrix rain sample using ScreenSegmAText() and it also doesn't work:

ScreenSegmAText(g, TextBuf, Font_Copy, FONTH, DefPal16, TEXTWB);

Expected output would be the matrix rain but with random CGA colors instead I get no monitor sync at all.

Hi I am working on a pico motherboard. My question is that if it's possible to move the output to other pins, because I still want the uart pins for data transmission.

Hi I am trying to get a rca output to work with this circuit:

This circuit works by combining the five VGA signals (R, G, B, H and V) into a crude approximation of a monochrome [RS-170] signal. The resistors at the top do a rough weighting of the three color channels to approximate how the eye responds to intensity, and the two resistors at the bottom add a combined sync signal to the mix.

I have tried this circuit diagram with the vga output of the pico, so I can have 2 video out ports on my pico. However only the vga port worked, and the rca didn't. I am not sure about the problem, but the possible problem might be:

1. I used regular ground for BGND since the pico doesn't have a individual ground for each color.
2. The pico have CSYNC instead of HSYNC and VSYNC In the documentation, it also states "The circuit needs VGA to TV drivers which output negative polarity HSYNC and VSYNC signals"

Do you have any ideas how I can make this work?

Are you using both SPI buses for this project? Will this project work with the "no OS SD" SD card driver if not? https://github.com/carlk3/no-OS-FatFS-SD-SPI-RPi-Pico Thank you for your time.

Hi, Please guide me to include a third-party library https://github.com/carlk3/no-OS-FatFS-SD-SPI-RPi-Pico in the picoVGA so that a file from a microSD card can be displayed over VGA monitor. Thanks and regards, Sourav

I am using PicoVGA with a RP2014 Zero board that has a more limited option of pins than the Pi Pico. I want to use UART and SPI and for that I need to assign VGA_GPIO_SYNC to a GPIO that is not consecutive to the color pins. From a quick look at the code, it seems that this will only affect the pins initialization in vga.c, (VGA_GPIO_SYNC would need to be initialized separately):

// connect PIO to the pad
for (i = VGA_GPIO_FIRST; i <= VGA_GPIO_LAST; i++) pio_gpio_init(VGA_PIO, i);

...

// set pin direction to output
pio_sm_set_consecutive_pindirs(VGA_PIO, VGA_SM(layer), VGA_GPIO_FIRST, VGA_GPIO_NUM, true);

Can you confirm this? Is this change worth a pull request?

This looks great as a project.

The build system seems very Windows specific, will this build with the Linux pico gcc tools ? I have a "VGA demo base" for the Pico, how does the pinout compare, how do I configure it ?

Thanks.

I apologise in advance, my c is very rusty and this seems like a fairly straight forward task but I've been at it for hours and somehow I'm getting nothing coming out of the vga port anymore (though I should make clear compiling and running the demos included all worked).

I have an image that's 192x144 and I want to scale it to the VESA resolution, but I can't seem to get there. I've converted the source bmp using the tool you included and have:

// format: 8-bit pixel graphics
// image width: 192 pixels
// image height: 144 lines
// image pitch: 192 bytes
const u8 myImage[27648] __attribute__ ((aligned(4))) = {
// ...

I call this method to prepare the transform:

void SetMat()
{
  // IMGW = 192, IMGH=144, WIDTH=1152, HEIGHT=864
  Mat.PrepDrawImg(IMGW, IMGH, 0, 0, WIDTH, HEIGHT, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0);
  Mat.ExportInt(MatInt);
}

Then my main is - the setup videomode bit being where I think it's going wrong but I copied from the other examples in the hope I could get it to work.

int main()
{
  imageCanvas.img = (u8 *)myImage;
  imageCanvas.w = IMGW;
  imageCanvas.h = IMGH;
  imageCanvas.wb = IMGW;
  imageCanvas.format = CANVAS_8;

  Canvas.w = WIDTH;
  Canvas.h = HEIGHT;
  Canvas.wb = WIDTH;
  Canvas.format = CANVAS_8;

  SetMat();

  // setup videomode
  VgaCfgDef(&Cfg);        // get default configuration
  Cfg.video = &VideoVESA; // video timings
  Cfg.width = WIDTH;      // screen width
  Cfg.height = HEIGHT;    // screen height
  Cfg.wfull = WIDTH;      // full width
  Cfg.dbly = False;       // double Y
  VgaCfg(&Cfg, &Vmode); // calculate videomode setup

  // // initialize base layer 0 to simple color (will be not visible)
  // ScreenClear(pScreen);
  // sStrip *t = ScreenAddStrip(pScreen, Vmode.height);
  // sSegm *g = ScreenAddSegm(t, Vmode.width);
  // ScreenSegmColor(g, 0xff00ff00, 0x00ff00ff);
  // initialize system clock
  if (clock_get_hz(clk_sys) != Vmode.freq * 1000)
  set_sys_clock_pll(Vmode.vco * 1000, Vmode.pd1, Vmode.pd2);

  // initialize videomode
  VgaInitReq(&Vmode);

  DrawImgMat(&Canvas, &imageCanvas, 0, 0, WIDTH, HEIGHT, &Mat, DRAWIMG_CLAMP, 0);

  while (true)
  {
    // maybe call again later
    // DrawImgMat(&Canvas, &imageCanvas, 0, 0, WIDTH, HEIGHT, &Mat, DRAWIMG_CLAMP, 0);
  }
}

This isn't putting anything out on the the video port once it's running on the pico, and I'm hoping that … someone(?) might be able to set me straight, again, on what I'd imagine is fairly straight forward.

Thanks in advance.