This product got replace by my 4x Video Display Shield/Wing.

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What is it?

This Arduino Video Display Shield provides an analog composite video display with integrated frame buffer memory accessible through SPI. It can be ordered as NTSC version with a 3.579545MHz crystal or as PAL version with 4.43618MHz crystal. Currently, 2 resolutions are implemented:

• NTSC 320x200 with 256 colours (40x25 characters text mode)
• PAL 300x240 with 256 colours (37x30 characters text mode)

The heart of this design is the VLSI VS23S010D-L chip, which is able to output composite video with resolutions from 320x200 in 65536 colours to 720x576 in 4 colours. The chip has a 1Mbit framebuffer, unused memory can be used for graphics tiles, which can be copied into the image data by the internal fast memory block move hardware.

A 2Mbit SPI FLASH memory is available onboard. It is pre-loaded with a character bitmap consisting of 94 characters (ASCII code 33-126). A SOIC-8 footprint for an I2C EEPROM is also on board, but not populated.

The board uses the Arduino IOREF voltage to translate between 3.3V on the shield side and the respective IO voltage on the Arduino side. This shield works together with UNO, MEGA and also with any 3.3V system that uses the Arduino form factor and pinout, without modifications.

Specifications

• Lead-free components and soldering
• Operating supply voltage 4.5V - 20V
• Board IO voltage (IOREF) 1.5V - 5.5V
• Composite Video Output
• Maximum resolution 720x576 in 4 colours
• Implemented resolutions: NTSC 320x200 with 256 colours and PAL 300x240 with 256 colours
• Crystal: NTSC 3.579545MHz or PAL 4.43618MHz
• Communication interface: SPI up to 38MHz
• Video Frame Buffer: 1Mbit = 128KByte
• Flash: 2Mbit = 256KByte
• EEPROM: up to 2Mbit (optional, not populated)
• IO connectors Arduino compatible
• Size: 61.3mm x 53.4mm (2.4" x 2.1")

Why did you make it?

I wanted to provide a device to give full format display capabilities to the Arduino world and make use of all the analog video displays and composite video inputs that are still available on every LCD TV.

What makes it special?

This is a video card for Arduino that uses a dedicated framebuffer + hardware to generate the video signal. This keeps the controller free for its main tasks and updates the display framebuffer through fast SPI transfers. There are a lot of solutions out there that use the microcontroller itself and its internal peripherals for timing and signal generation. Those take valuable resource and computing power away from the microcontroller.