https://archive.org/details/Cheap_Video_Cookbook_Don_Lancast...
>Basically PIO smells like a wart to me. I genuinely don't know who wants it. Regular hackers aren't sophisticated enough to use it productively and the snobby nerds have better options.
driving complex displays with no spu use: https://dmitry.gr/?r=06.%20Thoughts&proj=09.ComplexPioMachin... (my work)
pretending to be memory stick and sd card at dozens of mhz as a slave to a sync bus (my work)
ethernet: https://github.com/kingyoPiyo/Pico-10BASE-T (not my work)
68k bus slave (my work)
usb host https://github.com/sekigon-gonnoc/Pico-PIO-USB (not my work)
all on a $1 chip
Also the new HSTX (high-speed serial transmit) unit is really well suited for rapid line coding.
Here's a different project that generates a high resolution high depth VGA signal from the RP 2350: https://www.breatharian.eu/hw/disphstx/index_en.html
And here's NTSC composite using just the original PIO: https://github.com/obstruse/pico-composite8
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaksija_(computer)
https://media.ccc.de/v/29c3-5178-en-the_ultimate_galaksija_t...
* I also started with an RP2040 because the PIO is such a good Swiss Army knife for working with custom digital protocols. An RP2040 with a faster USB PHY would be killer!
* The STM32U5 series has variants with built-in High Speed USB PHYs, along with 2.5 megabytes of SRAM, along with easily solderable footprints (down to LQFP64) if you want to solder at home instead of having a PCB fab do it.
* JLCPCB and/or PCBWay can assemble boards for quite cheap these days
* ESD protection would be good to add to the board, as others have noted and as you mention in the post
* Ideally all routed traces which have fast rise/fall times (most digital signals) should have a solid reference plane under them along the entire trace, to avoid cross-talk and EMI, along with vias for your reference plane if your signal changes layers.
* If you control the rendering, and color banding is still an issue, look into Interleaved Gradient Noise
* I hadn't heard of GUD before. I just made a simple USB Bulk Out endpoint in the firmware and in my application code, took less than a day. Sometimes a custom solution is quicker and easier but it depends on where it's running and who you're distributing it to. Obviously my custom solution isn't interoperable with other things, but for now it doesn't need to be.
I plan to write up a blog post on the project I worked on, I'll be sure to post it to HN when I do.
https://blog.demofox.org/2022/01/01/interleaved-gradient-noi...