Suggestion: Add support for OLED and character I2C displays

Discussion of XBMC4XBOX development.
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tjd2
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Suggestion: Add support for OLED and character I2C displays

Post by tjd2 »

When the xbox modding scene was most active, i2c displays were pretty uncommon afaik.

However because of Arduino, I2C displays are very simple to get and also very cheap.

Xbox has SMBus (I2C) controller integrated in MCPX. I2C bus is used for eeprom, smc and video encoder. Therefore such displays won't need modchip, but just soldering bunch of wires to LPC debug port.

There are already Arduino libraries available for these displays, that might be possible to modify. Of course the actual low level i2c command sending will need to be redone, but the rest should be good.

For example this display would look awesome in OG xbox. Although it's small, it has very high contrast and it's also compact.

Image

There are also 16x2 and 20x4 displays, which use I2C (they have a converter board soldered on them).
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professor_jonny
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Re: Suggestion: Add support for OLED and character I2C displays

Post by professor_jonny »

The I2C is a system management bus it was not designed for this is best not to block the traffic on it with transferring LCD data.
The LPC bus is designed for attaching low speed peripherals and is best to use it for addons.

CPLD's can be programmed to translate from LPC transactions to drive any thing you want (there is even sample code from Ben and Ryan) with a supported backend one must just recreate lframe on newer boards.

If you pick a fast enough micro controller you could bit bang the LPC bus and add control and logic to the LCD it could in theory read data system data off the I2C bus like temp fan speed eeprom data etc... independent of the app in use on the XBOX.

As you say this gear is cheap now days unlike what it was back in the day and it would be better to add value to any mods as we can all ready drive an LCD.
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