In this video I will be looking into building a serial terminal with the RP2040 microcontroller from Raspberry Pi and an electroluminescent screen. The project is open source under MIT on GitHub: github.com/zephray/ELTerm
I like this terminal, it looks so retro especially with the amber - yellow EL panel. Imagine the ENTIRE terminal motherboard on one single chip. Technology is both interesting and WILD.
I could not focus on a single word of this video and what Wenting was talking about -- I was much too enamored by the glorious stacks of Thinkpads on the rack🙂 Kudos to you for your phenomenal work, especially the X61 mods!
The look of that terminal reminds me so much of Astra Protocol 2's default UI/Terminal color All it needs is a speech synthesizer and a Tektronix 4014 mode and it would be a perfect dedicated system for that.
That is really professional! 0.02% CPU load at 120 Hz refresh. Have you thought more about the greyscale? I presume that will have to be by PWM, i.e. flashing pixels individually to reduce their brightness. I am going to try to implement smething similar with a VGA display.
this is incredible of all the "virtual" terminal emulator i used on Linux, none had that feature they all "jump" between text lines, even Kitty that has GPU renderer
Impressive! RP2040 is QFN-56, a lot of the soldering is done under the chip? it looks--difficult. I've hand soldered LQFPs but they have more to work to work with in terms of pins etc. Did you solder the RP2040 to your custom board by hand?
QFNs have pads around the edge and probably one at the bottom. I’ve not soldered one (but have done 240 pin QFPs) and I’m confident I could solder QFNs. Loads of flux. :)
Drag solder the outer 56 pins, and if there is a ground or thermal pad under the chip, place a large via under the chip so you can solder that from the underside of the board.
I tend to use either hot air soldering gun or Infrared toaster oven to solder the whole assembly together. Kinda easier that way compared to hand-soldering.
connect. read draw it. write it sended and it come back when read you see change. it should be automatic. cursor movement are sended thru bcoz you connected terminal. serial cant magical work unles there something software running to accept. so you draw what you get
