Sunday 30 April 2017

i.MX6SX - Using the cortex M4 on a UDOO NEO to drive a $4 Touch Screen

The challenge here was to see if a ultra cheap touch screen could be made to work with the cortex M4 on the UDOO NEO. The video (below) demonstrates its possible, the M4 is controlling the display and a simple UI allows the toggling of the green LED.


I managed to pick up a 2.0" touch screen for around $4, although the screen is on the slightly small side, it still manages to support a resolution of 320x240. Normally these type of screens are sold into a secondary market with the hope that they can be interfaced to an Arduino, their primary use seems to a PDA or home communication device given the imprinted icons (which aren't removable).


The display supports a 8 bit parallel LCD interface (using the S6D1125) along with a 4 wire resistive touch. The downside with using such a display is that it requires a large number of pins, in our case 12 GPIO pins and 2 analogue pins (for resistive touch).

The code to drive the display was built using the i.mx6sx FreeRTOS sdk.