Hi everyone. I'm designing a PCB for a project that I'm making. Among many things, the PCB will have video output, and an integrated display (preferably a Smartphone display with a DSI interface, maybe 5"-5.5" with a 720 or 1080 resolution) I have most aspects of the board fully designed, I am stuck with the display. I don't know enough about display technology (specifically DSI) to know how to proceed.
My project will not use a Raspberry Pi, but for the purpose of teaching myself more about DSI, I will be using my Raspberry Pi 3 to play around with it. I want to use the DSI connector on the board, not HDMI.
I've done a bunch of reading about DSI and also I've searched around online to see if anyone else has used the DSI ribbon connector on the Pi to drive a Smartphone display. I can't seem to find anyone that has done it (except for the official Raspbery Pi DSI display). I've only found a bunch of people saying that it is too hard to do it for various reasons (the connector doesnt typically fit, or you might need some kind of controller board to control the display).
I'd love to read the specification sheets for DSI, but unfortunately the MIPI organization requires you to be a manufacturer to join and access the Spec sheets.
I've shopped around for ICs that control DSI displays, and I see that Texas Instruments and several other companies have some pretty simple chips that perform various functions related to DSI, but I don't know nearly enough about DSI to know how to dive into this, so I have a few questions:
- Do you actually need a controller circuit to connect any given DSI Smartphone display to a Raspberry Pi? Or is the issue simply that you need a proprietary ribbon cable?
- If you need a controller, what specifically does the controller need to accomplish? Is this superficial stuff like panel brightness/contrast? Or is this actual functionality things like defining pins for differential signaling and such?
- Are there any available reading materials I can get access to without being a MIPI member?
