An Overview Of The Basic Arduino VGA
As you may have guessed, VGA is pretty hard for the Arduino to output and getting a full 800x600 resolution picture to display using only Arduino is basically impossible, however! we can use the flexibility of VGA to our advantage and output simplistic things like we did in this article. Three blocks of colors, red, green and blue were output to the screen proving that we can output simplistic VGA.
What To Do Now
I wouldn't recommend spending too much time continuing down the route of outputting VGA signals from an Arduino as it gets much more difficult because of the timing requirements. Ultimately you'll probably end up frustrated and using raw assembly...so masochists only for that path. However, there are many VGA controllers out there that the Arduino could interface to making outputting things to a VGA monitor far easier. I'm sure there's an Arduino shield somewhere on the interwebs that offers this kind of thing.
Conclusion
If we re-read the purpose of this article and project then its obvious that we got this project working exactly the way we wanted to. The three colors displayed on the screen in blocks as expected. The software wasn't so friendly but it was definitely do-able. However, dynamic VGA output seems to be a big curiousity...I wonder if the Arduino could handle that?
If you have any further questions, I implore you...don't be shy, take a look at the forums or ask a question there. I check them out regularly and love getting comments & questions.
As you may have guessed, VGA is pretty hard for the Arduino to output and getting a full 800x600 resolution picture to display using only Arduino is basically impossible, however! we can use the flexibility of VGA to our advantage and output simplistic things like we did in this article. Three blocks of colors, red, green and blue were output to the screen proving that we can output simplistic VGA.
What To Do Now
I wouldn't recommend spending too much time continuing down the route of outputting VGA signals from an Arduino as it gets much more difficult because of the timing requirements. Ultimately you'll probably end up frustrated and using raw assembly...so masochists only for that path. However, there are many VGA controllers out there that the Arduino could interface to making outputting things to a VGA monitor far easier. I'm sure there's an Arduino shield somewhere on the interwebs that offers this kind of thing.
Conclusion
If we re-read the purpose of this article and project then its obvious that we got this project working exactly the way we wanted to. The three colors displayed on the screen in blocks as expected. The software wasn't so friendly but it was definitely do-able. However, dynamic VGA output seems to be a big curiousity...I wonder if the Arduino could handle that?
If you have any further questions, I implore you...don't be shy, take a look at the forums or ask a question there. I check them out regularly and love getting comments & questions.