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Comment by jrexilius | Hacker News Reader

wow. this is amazing work, and answers a question I've had for a while. Thanks for putting this out there!

The RP2040 is a really capable little microcontroller. http://wiki.picosystem.com/ https://kilograham.github.io/rp2040-doom/

> and answers a question I've had for a while

I am curious, which?

Possibly "is the Waveshare display really that bad?" — as someone who's implemented a few projects with it but suffered from its terrible existing driver support... I know it's nice to see a more in-depth explanation of what makes it bad (and creatively working around that) in this post.

If it was possible to drive a touch interface and SPI display of that size from an MCU of that size/speed and still be responsive. I have only driven them from Pi Zeros, PocketBeagles and other much larger/faster systems, and still noticed some drag. Up to now, I've stuck to smaller displays without a touch layer for projects where I'm using the RP2040. [caveat: I am _not_ an embedded systems SWE so still figuring out where limitations are hardware vs. my knowledge]

Now you can use that display too :)

As the driver uses no CPU, CPU speed doesn’t matter

Impressive work. I hope the original designers of the RP2040 PIO system are well pleased.

I hope they are. I also hope their next generation will have more PIOs and ideally a bit more instructions.

I only have one wish for PIOv2 in future chips: wire it up to the AHBlite bus as a target, behind a small cache, so i can make my own QSPI iface (or 8xSPI, or 16xSPI, or SDRAM, etc)

I mentioned upthread that I bought an ESP32-based DLC-32 3D printer/laser controller board. It uses a 2.4" TFT SPI display. Admittedly, I didn't use it for very long before reflashing it with my own test code, but the display seemed pretty responsive.

I've been doing a lot of work with TFT_eSPI recently, but only on the display side (not using touch input) using the LVGL framework and it is very nice and smooth.

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