Mini VGA Monitor, battery powered

Hi Padu,

I would recommend (if you can't find exactly what you're after) grabing a portable DVD/gaming screen (around $50 these days) and then grab a VGA ->

RCA converter (also pretty cheap and typically operated off of 9V wall wart).

HTH Steve

"Steve"

Actually your suggestion was double good. My mini-itx board outputs both regular vga and RCA...

Do you have any suggestion where could I find or manufacturers of such screens?

Cheers

Padu

If you need a bunch, nope.

But if you just need one or a few, look at the PSOne LCD screens. You can get them on Ebay for $20-40. I've been thinking about getting one and playing with it.

"Mark Haase"

Mark my man! Thanks for the suggestion. Just bought one for $30 bucks from ebay "sealed in box" It seems it has AV in, but I found a site that tells you how to hack it and connect VGA signals directly to it. I'll experiment.

Cheers

Padu

If you can get the VGA direct input, I think you will be a lot happier with the results. The RCA jack is NTSC video and NTSC video is really lacking on bandwidth. Most of the reason that the ancient computers (or webtv) that were designed to display text to a home TV only displayed 40 characters per line is because NTSC video won't support more.

NTSC color video has the color subcarrier at 3.58 mhz above the luminance (video) signal and is the upper video frequency limit. A horizontal line is about 63.5 uS long. 63.6e-6 * 3.58e6 ~ 227 pixels per line

The color bandwidth is even worse (

"MetalHead"

Yes, that's what I'm gonna do. Let me spend one paragraph explaining what I'm doing, and perhaps people will chime in with new ideas.

My robot (an autonomous rover) has a mini-itx as a brain. What I'm trying to do is to have some sort of monitor to that computer for a couple of different occasions. On my bench, I have a 15 in. LCD monitor, but on the field, I'd have to have a power inverter to power that monitor. I could do that, but a 15 inches monitor is not quite portable and it is not really optimized for battery power. So the first use would be to set up and make small adjustments to my robot while field testing, and for that I plan to use the VGA capabilities of the LCD screen. The second use is as a real time monitor. While running the rover won't have any monitor (of course), but as my mini-itx board has video out (RCA) by default, I was thinking in transmitting that feed to the monitor using its video in input. I also have wi-fi on board, so perhaps I will use it for remote monitoring instead of using the on board video out.

Is there any VGA transmitter/receiver available on the market (a cheap one)?

Cheers

Padu

Here's an X-10 product that might work:

Also, there used to be a product call something like "VCR Rabbit" that would broadcast video (and sound) to a dedicated receiving unit.

-- Mark "I prefer heaven for climate, hell for company."

Got my psOne screen yesterday, although I saw many sites teaching how to hack it in order to use its VGA capabilities, I've decided to check its RCA qualities first. One thing I didn't know and now I'm happily surprised with, is that my mini-itx built in video adapter considers the RCA output as a second monitor... so the only thing I had to do was to enable the second monitor and plug the psOne video cable in the video out of my board. Seems like the max resolution of the psOne is 640x480. Although it did display higher resolutions (I tried 800x600), the size of things and overal quality was not so good. I've set my application to have a bordless screen of 640x480 and set the analog output monitor to have the same resolution. I don't use small fonts in my application, so surprisingly the analog output quality was more than enough for my application. Very vibrant colors!

Turns out that this is the perfect configuration for my robot, since I can leave the "robot monitor screen" constantly running on the psOne, and when I need to set up something, I'll just plut a VGA monitor, keyboard and mouse and I have full access to the "regular" windows desktop.

Additionally it has two built in speakers... I was reticent on using sound output because of the extra weight of speakers... now that they're there, I may as well use them...

I paid a tad bellow $30 bucks for it... brand new sealed box. I'm ultra happy with my purchase. I'm seriously thinking about buying a couple more of this just to have it around for future projects. Thanks for the suggestion!

Padu

That's really good to hear. I was wondering how well it would work in a robotics application. Did you buy the Sony branded screen or a 3rd party screen? Post the updated pictures when you get a chance.

"Mark Haase"

I bought the Sony psOne, factory sealed. I need to do some current measurements to find out exactly how eager that babe is for power. I will take some pictures and post it later.

Cheers

Padu