Open drewsum opened 9 months ago
I had chatted with Michael a bunch about this, and the PIC32MZ DA seems like a good fit. This will require a lot of investment in code and hardware development, but since it's meant for video, it seems like a good idea.
There are a few different flavors of PIC32MZ DA, but the more modern SKUs from circa 2019 have a datasheet here: https://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/aemDocuments/documents/MCU32/ProductDocuments/DataSheets/PIC32MZ-Graphics-%28DAK-DAL-DAR-DAS%29-Family-Datasheet-DS60001565D.pdf
They offer them in BGA and LQFP packages in high pin counts. I looked into the BGA package in KiCad briefly and it looks like the ball pitch is barely too tight to make work with JLCPCB design rules. I think it would be easier to use the LQFP package, but would take up much more space.
Looking at the SKUs for this package, these are available:
I think the PIC32MZ2064DAR176 is most realistic. The high internal SRAM is nice, as is the internal 32MB DDR2, which we'd use as a frame buffer for the LCD. We could also try to get fancy with microchip's GUI generation tools.
This is enough of a departure from my current projects to make this interesting and require engineering and firmware rigor, but is close enough where a lot of code could be ported over easily.
PIC32MZ2064DAR176 appears to be available in ok-ish quantities according to octopart. If we design a PCB around this, the good news is that there are other options that are drop in replacements, just with different memory sizes. So I think that the part selection is actually quite flexible.