Meet Evita!

EVITA - Almost ready for PCB Manufacture

On New Year's Eve, I posted a little about a new board which I am designing.  The CAD files are almost ready for production - so this little EVITA board is going to be the first new design of the year.

EVITA uses the next generation of EVE IC from FTDI  - in this case the FT812 or FT813. Instead of outputting digital video data to a TFT LCD module, EVITA uses a set of resistor networks - actiing as digital to analogue converters, to allow the analogue RGB signal to be reconstructed. In this way, EVITA can display full 24 bit colour on a large screen monitor or TV up to a resolution of 1024 x 768 pixels at 60Hz - provided that it has a VGA connector.

EVITA is fundamentally a graphics co-processor, built onto an "Arduino" shield.  With the standard Arduino expansion headers - EVITA will fit a wide range of microcontroller and FPGA development boards - from a variety of different manufacturers and IC vendors. EVITA has been designed to be a universal graphics adaptor - for small microcontroller projects.

EVITA adds bold, high resolution graphics, images and MPEG movies to your microcontroller application.

Use it as a versatile video interface for retro-gaming,  as a complete computing shield for retro-computing with keyboard, mouse and audio interfaces or as a stunning  video enhancement to your latest Arduino project.  Develop complex graphical user interfaces on the big screen - before porting them to a LCD module.

Here are some of the main features:

• XGA Video Output   1024 x 768 pixels at 60Hz  24 bit colour
• Capable of high resolution animated graphics, JPG viewing and MPEG Playing  
• Arduino shield footprint - to suit most dev-boards
• 5V tolerant inputs.
• On chip audio synthesiser with 3.5mm jack Audio Output
• Micro SD card holder for storing graphics, JPG and MPEG video
• PS/2 Keyboard Interface
• PS/2 Mouse Interface
• Low cost Open Source Hardware and Software
• Pin Compatible with GameDuino 2
• Suits any microcontroller or FPGA  - Arduino/ZPUino GameDuino 2 library available
• Low power - can be used in battery powered applications.

EVITA has been developed in collaboration with James Bowman at Excamera Labs and Jack Gassett at the Gadget Factory.

We hope to have samples of EVITA available through the Gadget Factory for the early spring.

James has put together a timely video demo:

Happy New Year.