How to store a JPEG type file in a MCU and display via VGA

I am currently developing an application using the Microchip PIC18F8520. This chip would easily do what you require and is quite powerful with 32k or Flash rom and 1K of EEPROM.  If you wished to store multiple images, you can attached up to 2Mb of external memory. To output to a VGA monitor you would only require six connections, for the R, G, B, horizontal and vertical sync.  I am using Mikroelectronica kit (BIGPIC5 and MikroC PRO) at the moment as it has SD card reader, Touchscreen GLCD and LCD, inbuilt ICD etc....  This is the first time I have used C on a PIC as all my previous code was in Assembly language.

I cannot make any recommendations on the JPEG side of things as it looks kinda complicated. Have a read about it on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG

Remember that JPEG is compressed so you will have to read up on how to uncompress the file to display on a VGA monitor.  I would be worried about the potential of law suits if you planned to implement any algorithm into a commercial product.  It would be easier to work with BMP files (royalty and patent free) although they will be larger.

If you use a development kit like the one above, you could store your image on a SD card and just write a program to access the image and output it to the screen, alternatively start by working out how to interface a SD card to the uP and start with a small bitmap of something like 12x12.

You could have a look at the graphics controller systems from 4D SYSTEMS, Farnell sell them and they look to easily connect to any type of MCU.

Plenty of people have had a play at outputting to VGA, just Google it. One that I found interesting was http://webpages.charter.net/greener/electronics/video1/

Dave

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There are 10 types of people - Those that understand Binary and those that don't.

Thanks friend, you ur information help me a lot, hope to see your project done soon, and hope both of our project went well..

Thanks and best regards

Hi,

One way to do that is to use Microchip FREE graphics libraries (source format in C) which you can download here : http://www.microchip.com/MAL.

These libraries can be used with any 16 (PIC24 / dsPIC) or 32 bits PIC which has a PMP interface.

Depending upon the external LCD controller, JPEG decoding can be done by the PIC or by the LCD controller.

e.g our latest graphics development kit ( AC164127-3AC164127-3 ) includes an SSD1926 LCD controller from Solomon Systech which has an on-chip JPEG decoder. If you use a controller without JPEG decoding, Microchip libraries can do JPEG decoding by SW but it takes some performance (PIC32 is recommended resolution above QVGA, especially if SW decoding is done by SW )

The libraries can store images into SD card, external SPI FLASH using FAT filesystem

regards