hiya fellow nerds, I was wondering if it is possible to somehow synthesize color analog video with a Raspberry pi pico on micropython firmware. if it is how should I go about making it?
just in terms of is it possible to do analog video on a pico:
there are breakout boards for VGA video certainly that would be agood place to start if you don’t want to get into the weeds using pinout stuffs
vga is nice for this kind of thing b/c you don’t have to mess around with chroma subcarrier and have a larger potential array of resolutions and frame rates to work with.
color NTSC/PAL video i think will require a bit more nuance but i know from experience that you can do fairly grungy CVBS on an esp32 and theres not any radical spec difference between esp and pico i can see that would rule it out. most projects ive seen require you to wire up your own video output from the pinouts
regarding micropython projects, thats beyond my general knowledge. As a general rule there will be 100% more examples of video game based projects out there for microcontrollers than for general abstract controllable visuals. except for maybe milkdrop, people love porting milkdrop to things nowadays. theres a very good chance that if you’d like to do something that steers towards video synth stuff eg nuanced fine tune control over a raster at resolutions and rates that are approximately close to CVBS standards you may not be able to avoid c/c++.
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Yea originally (for some reason) I wanted to do composite, but I was thinking about picking up something like this Pimoroni Pico VGA Demo Base , and then a Cheap VGA to video convertor
PiShop has them:
Oh Well thank you!!
This may be of interest: Pico-mposite
Composite video directly out of the pico, either in grayscale or color depending on the build. Looks like it goes as far as displaying an image.
It’s C based rather than Python though, but could be a starting point or useful reference ?
some great links here, I’m enjoying this thread! Thanks : )
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the pico-ompsite looks like a good spot to start with. couple things i can see from the description
- the greyscale version would work for any CVBS, looks like color is PAL or close enough for horseshoes. there is an encoder chip involved, taking rgbhv so probalby not a huge deal to get NTSC if thats what you want
- there is buffering involved, looks like 2 lines at a time. this seems fairly necesary for stuff like displaying images from a file, but for video synthesis you could likely bypass buffering stages and instead generate signals based entirely on geometry, buffering just pixels at a time, ‘racing the beam’ so to speak Racing the Beam - Wikipedia
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There are also esp32 and Arduino projects out there. IDK if you asked about Pico because you have a requirement for that, or perhaps that’s the MCU you’ve heard of. So, just want to flag that there are other MCUs out there.
The RPI Zero has direct composite out, and it runs linux, so lots of flexibility there.
funny I heard that term for the first time the other day. Early programming was something else!
there’s a couple of fpga boards out for the zero + pico I saw recently - seem interesting
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