Pi Pico and Pico W VGA driver

Description

It's a single-color tiny VGA driver for Pi Pico and Pico W which uses 37.4KB memory for pixels storage. Based on principles described on the https://vanhunteradams.com/Pico/VGA/VGA.html page. Inspired by the repo https://github.com/HughMaingauche/PICO-VGA-Micropython

Running locally

By default, it uses GPIO-0 for the RED channel, GPIO-4 for H-SYNC, and GPIO-5 for V-SYNC. You may redefine GPIO pins on the VGA driver initialization. For H-SYNC and V-SYNC channels you have to use 47 ohm resistors and for color channels 300 ohm.

BLUE and GREEN channels are connected to the GND as other VGA pins (5,6,7,8,9,10):

If you prefer another font color (GREEN or BLUE), you need to connect necessary colour-channel to COLOR GPIO output (by default - GPIO-0). All unnecessary colour channels should be connected to the GND.

To test it locally you have to connect the VGA cable to GPIO pins via resistors, than install mpremote tool and now you may use make command to run the example:

git clone https://github.com/hakierspejs/pico-vga-driver.git
cd pico-vga-driver
make run

The default example draws Hackerspace Łódź logo with QR link.

Example of usage:

import gc
import utime
import micropython

from vga_driver import TinyVgaDriver


def main():
    vga = TinyVgaDriver()
    print(micropython.mem_info())
    vga.start_synchronisation()
    print(micropython.mem_info())

    for i in range(4):
        vga.fbuf.fill(vga.COLOR_BLACK)
        utime.sleep_ms(1000)
        vga.fbuf.fill(vga.COLOR_RED)
        utime.sleep_ms(1000)
        gc.collect()

    utime.sleep_ms(10000)
    vga.stop_synchronisation()
    gc.collect()


if __name__ == "__main__":

More examples you may find in the examples folder.

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Feel free to contribute