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Comment by dmitrygr | Hacker News Reader

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

I am curious, which?

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.

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.

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