I was just browsing the UK Farnell electronics site and I notice a link to their New Itron VFD displays.
One in particular caught my eye:
This One (PDF file from Noritake-Itron's website - you may have to "register" to download it) is a 128 by 32 Graphic VFD, with +5volt single input voltage (transformerless) design, that supports Async Serial and SPI serial interfaces for around $50UKP in Qty 1.

This is the page on The Farnell website. If that link doesn't work go to www.farnell.co.uk and click on the "New VFDs link on the right hand side of the main page.

The display is the 32 x 128 pixel graphic VFD module shown in the Bi-Directional Asynchronous and SPI Interface with Keyscan section on that page.

The thing that really caught my eye though is that this display also has a small 8 bit "port" on the display that can be configured to read and report (automatically on the serial port) any keypresses received on a up to 4 by 4 key matrix keyboard.

I had a thought that some folks might find this display a very useful starting pint to build a remote display for their empeg, with buttons from.

There is only one snag to this though - as far as I can tell the display itself does not support more than 1 bit per pixel so that each dot is either on or off. (The whole display can be dimmed in 10%-20% "steps" but not each pixel). The Empeg has 2 bits per pixel, so each pixel or dot on the display can be either: off, not-quite-so-off, sort-of dim, or full brightness. The not-quite-so-off brightness level is hard to see, and the sort-of-dim level hard to see in sunlight.

While this is an annoying limitation, its not necessarily a showstopper (not all visiauls use the "dim" modes on the Empeg display, and you could either have those pixels rendered to black (dot off) or white (dot on) in the software that does the Empeg display capture and dumping. This will make the display look blocky though as the various brightness levels do make for much nicer display.

You can run this display up to 38400 baud in Async Serial mode, so you could send a graphic "dump" of the current empeg display (as a 1 bit per pixel) data stream, with the correct control characters at the start of each packet, over the serial port at up to 9 times a second, and possibly faster than that again if you used the SPI interface but that would require extra hardware on the interface to do so.
(the control/command sequence info is in the PDF file above but its about 10 bytes max per packet, and possibly 4 packets per screen may be required toi dump the whole screen to the device).

With this display and a simple 7 button keyboard (why 7? - well you need the 4 arrow keys, plus probably knob left "key', knob right "key" and "knob pressed" or "Enter" key) in a small display box, running off 5 volts (around 250ma is required for the display), and some software running on the empeg itself doing the "screen dumping" & keyboard decoding/"fake key injecting" back into the Empeg - you could easily get a somewhat usable remote display with buttons.

Sure this won't handle IR signals, but if thats *really* required you can buy small (wired) IR repeaters that will provide that capability.

And of course, with the software control of this display can blank it and turn off the display whenever the real Empeg display goes blank.


So, this may be of interest to someone - if anyone wants to build a kit for these (Patrick, where are you?) then I'll buy 2 of them now as I have a potential use for them in addition to Empeg displays.

There is also a wider (more pixels across the screen) than the above model - it has 32 x 180 pixels, the extra width could be used for additional display data (e.g. GPS info for navigation). This cost UKP4 more than the 32x128 pixel display and sucks 100ma more amps.

The empeg uses PWM to achieve it's 2bpp.... ie, it turns the pixels on and off fast enough that you can't see it, and refreshes at 40 frames per second. (IIRC)

The problem is that the data rate just isn't there over serial. I'd be inclined to wait a year or more before doing such a project - Noritake are doing some great stuff with multicolor VFDs, and ethernet is starting to progress into microcontroller cores. Once that happens, perhaps an ethernet -> multicolor display becomes a possibility. (Of course the multicolor would only really be useful as a means of getting car interior matching to a fine art - I can't see the empeg guys releasing player/visuals software that'd natively support multi-colors. But even that'd be great.)

The dithering for greyscales is much faster than that; the entire display is refreshed at 200Hz (might be 400, I can't remember now!).

The visuals update the screen at ~38Hz though, as they do FFTs (etc) on 1152 sample chunks. 44100/1152=38.something.

Hugo

Yeah, I was thinking that there was something wrong about that as I typed - it was late

Still doesn't help with the raw bandwidth though