Smart display platform expanded

Jon Lawson

Bridgetek, the spin-off joint venture from FTDI in Glasgow, UK, has added new hardware to its CleO smart display platform.

The CleOIO-Shield is an input/output expansion shield that connects directly on to the NerO system controller board, linking to the CleO35 3.5in and CleO50 5in TFT screens.

This provides the CleO system with greater interfacing capabilities with analogue, digital, I2C, SPI and UART connections.

The additional I/O functions made available by the 70mm x 53mm x 21mm shield can be connected through either the CleO’s Arduino Uno interface, a MikroBus header or the Grove-Universal 4pin connector option.

The shield also support additional daughter boards to add new functions to an embedded design. These include a rotary potentiometer module, a temperature/humidity sensing module, a voltmeter module, a light sensing module and a microphone module. There is also an FM radio functional block with a 4-pin to 2-pinx2 speaker cable.

Bridgetek has also introduced two development modules for its EmbeddedVideo Engine (EVE) graphics controllers. The ME812AU-WH50R and ME813AU-WH50C have resistive and capacitive touchscreen support for a 5.0in 800 x 480 pixel resolution TFT display (with a bezel for the ME812AU-WH50R version) in both landscape and portrait modes.

With built-in USB-to-SPI bridging technology, these modules act as USB peripheral devices and are straightforward to access from a PC or any other form of USB host. The modules also include dimmable backlighting and an audio amplifier capable of driving a 1W speaker to further simplify the system design.

The CleO and FTDI USB chip are designed to work closely together, and the MM930Mini Module provides a compact USB and flexible I/O development board. This combines the FT930Q bridging microcontroller with a hard-coded USB engine to provide up to 15 software configurable I/O endpoints. These may be configured with multiple channels for bridging USB to many standard I/Os, such as UART, SPI, or I2C, as well as offering support to bridge other I/O combinations.

The module has a pair of 30-pin dual-row headers that enable easy connection with PCB header sockets and ribbon cables and drivers for Windows, Mac OSX and Linux are available free of charge from the Bridgetek website.