Raspberry Pi enthusiasts looking for an easy way to add a small screen to their next Raspberry Pi Pico project may be interested in a new 1.54 inch LCD display created by Spotpear which is now available to purchase priced at $11.89. The small Raspberry Pi Pico display offers users a resolution of 240×240 pixels and features 10 buttons set out in a joypad style arrangement providing for directional buttons and four action buttons, making the perfect foundation for a tiny games console. Although they can be used for anything you can dream up.
Ben Everard over on the official Raspberry Pi blog has been able to have a hands-on experience with the IPS screen and provides his thoughts on the tiny Raspberry Pi Pico display.
“When we ran the example code, we were impressed with the quality of the screen. With 240×240 pixels in just 1.54 inches, there’s a high pixel density that can give crisp graphics. Obviously, high pixel densities are a double-edged sword. While they can look great, it does mean higher RAM use, more time transferring data, and more data to process.”
“Fortunately, Pico is well-suited to the task of driving screens. Each pixel can take 16 bits of colour data, so a full-frame buffer is just 115,200 bytes. The display data is transferred by SPI, and Pico has a maximum SPI frequency of half the clock speed. For MicroPython, that means 62.5MHz. The actual data transfer rate is a little less than this because of overhead of the protocol, but we were able to drive full-frame refreshes at over 40 fps, which is plenty for smooth animations.”
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