Maker Michael P. has as soon as once more been experimenting with uncommon shows, this time a single-color electroluminescent panel designed for industrial use hooked as much as a Raspberry Pi Pico — and, in order to not bury the lede, sure: it might probably run Doom.
“By probability, I obtained myself an industrial electroluminescent (EL) show,” Michael explains. “It’s one bit per pixel monochrome with lovely amber shade (which appears vivid yellow on digital camera) and has a decision of 320×256. I used to be questioning if I might put it to good use, so I began experimenting by driving it with a Raspberry Pi Pico.”
Michael P. has been placing a Raspberry Pi Pico to work driving a single-color industrial EL show panel. (📷: Michael P.)
An electroluminescent show works otherwise to a regular flat-panel show, because it would not require a backlight nor a frontlight; as an alternative, it is constructed by sandwiching an electroluminescent panel between two conductive layers. Whereas the panels Michael has picked up are restricted to a single shade, they’re common in industrial circles for the longevity and resistance to burn-in results when displaying static photos for lengthy intervals of time.
Having discovered find out how to handle the show, Michael turned to the Raspberry Pi Pico and its RP2040 microcontroller because the driving system. Experimenting with other ways to dither a picture right down to a single shade with out dropping an excessive amount of element — and whereas offering the phantasm of shades of grey — the maker started porting totally different purposes to the RP2040 to experiment, starting with the TinyGL 3D engine.
“I managed make it run and ported some demos reminiscent of glxgears and Sproingies from Xscreensaver. Though, it wants numerous optimization to run easily,” Michael explains. “The opposite factor that I’ve tried to date, is to adapt Graham Sanderson’s RP2040 Doom port. This labored out fairly properly, I managed to get an appropriate picture high quality so the sport is considerably playable. I am pondering of a ridiculously trying handheld console that may run Doom and different video games.”
Extra particulars can be found on Hackaday.io, whereas the supply code for the single-bit Doom port is accessible on GitHub beneath the reciprocal GPL 2.0 license; extra demo code is in a separate repository.