Higher Res Display?

Hi. I found a link to the supplier of the uConsole’s screen which has the txw500170b0 SKU. I couldn’t find any info on that exact screen on the panelook link, but came across this display. 5.0 Inch 1200x1920 Resolution Ips Amoled Lcd Tft Display Module For Various Applications - Buy 5 Inch Tft Lcd Module Product on Alibaba.com The SKU for this display is TXW500190B0 and also uses 40 pin MIPI. Could this possibly work with the uConsole? I understand that there wouldn’t be much benefit to a higher resolution screen, but I’m curious if it would work. Thanks!

Guess there’s only one way to find out :wink:
On the other hand all MIPI screens that i’ve connected to various SBCs were working out of the box without any need of configuration. µConsole’s (at least with R01) not the case requiring some post-boot initialization. So one might not avoid bigger or smaller hackery to make it work but at the end of the day if something claims to follow this or that spec then it’s compatibile, at least electrically.

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Physically it looks like it should fit. you’ll probably need to source the driver for it. The uConsole relies on the kernel to control the DSI port. I’d give it a shot myself if it wasn’t $35 shipped.

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Haha, I wish I had my hands on mine, but unfortunately I only found out about the shipping wait times until after I made my impulse purchase two days ago :stuck_out_tongue:. At least this gives me time to order the screen and get everything in place!

Looks like this screen’s pinout is not matching with cpi board’s connector, you need make a conversion board to handle the different pinout.

where did you found OP’s screen pinout? All i see on the Alibaba are oversaturated pictures and single promotion movie and surely no papers about the product.

I was wondering if there was a pin-compatible OLED display just today. Not really my area of expertise though. If ever anyone comes across one I’d love to know!

I found that on Alibaba pages, in Products Overview part.

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indeed, i haven’t scroll past customer’s reviews.
So the driver is hx8399c and i see it’s well known and supported by Linux, matter of welcoming it via FDT ;p
as for the pins- surely there should be some adapter in between but there should be one nevertheless given that FPC comes out of the side (shorter edge) while our LCD has its flat cable on the top/bottom (longer side).
So yeah, overall it should be more or less a fit with relatively low effort.

What i would personally like to see would be an old fashioned TFT LCD, like one in good old S60 Nokias. I had few models but what i recall from my 7650 was it’s full readability with minor colour distortion while being illuminated, even by direct sunlight. That kind of LCD i would be willing to mess around with.

even if you find one there’s still the matter of the driver and correctly exposing display’s interface to the underlying OS do be correctly driven.

If I may point out, since the link is for Alibaba, you may be able to negotiate for a customized pinout configuration to dispense yourself the hassle of acquiring a conversion adapter.

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guess they won’t be too happy to redesign the whole item for 18 bucks :wink:

sure it’s doable but feasible only for scenario where you start offering “hires lcd replacements” for 49.99 each

I forgot to add. The resolution on the uConsole’s stock display is sharp enough for my use case. Why force a >1080p screen on it? Do you guys have superhuman vision? I can also imagine the power penalty such a high-resolution screen will introduce.

Oh, and the screen is portrait by default. We ain’t getting out of the portrait setting rut, are we?

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I’d be more interested in a OLED panel then higher res one.

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one posted by OP is AMOLED, does it count? ;d

for what i understood, OP was asking in rather PoC-oriented manner.
But for what it’s worth, higher res enables more smooth graphics in cost of scaling, but i suppose that best advocates for this idea would be 24" LCD 4k daily driver pervs ;p

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An eInk/e-paper screen could be interesting for these devices as well, especially since it seems a lot of folks are using them outside (presumably in daylight). That might work especially well for terminal based stuff, but wouldn’t be as good for graphical desktops, watching videos, or playing games.

I wonder what ever happened to the tech the Notion Ink Adam tablet used back in the day? I still have mine somewhere… But it had some kind of color backlit display combined with eink which also gave a slight hint of color even though it was really only supposed to be greyscale. The battery life was surprisingly decent and I always thought it was an interesting compromise, though the backlit screen never looked as good as screens do today. (They were another company that made interesting and innovative hardware, but who pretty much failed on the software side of it.) It was only years later when community efforts produced up to date builds for the latest (at the time) Android OS with all the hardware working well that I actually started to use the thing – before that it was mostly a curiosity and a promising, but buggy thing. With the right setup, that thing was an excellent large-ish screen PDF reading device in all lighting conditions.

Using an eInk display would be a terrible idea for this. The refresh rate is insanely low. EInk displays are really only good for displaying static content or content that updates periodically. Trying to do work, even in a terminal, would be almost impossible.

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Terminal work on my Boox Tab Ultra C is not horrible, but you aren’t going to read things scrolling by, like when a switch boots. When you are programming a switch, it’s not that bad. That’s at normal refresh rate, not super fast.

A grayscale e-ink could be nice for some people, but color e-ink would add a lot of cost!

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I think people have been scarred by bad experiences with old kindles. I wouldn’t watch a video on a modern e-ink display but I like how they display text.

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