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Hardware Design

The Display Driver

The hardware design of this project consisted of conditioning signals to be accepted by the various IC’s.  The three IC’s that we used in this design were:

 

·        Atmel Mega163 Microcontroller

·        Analog Devices AD724 RGB to NTSC converter

·        Elm Electronics Sync Generator

 

We used various resistors and capacitors in our design, but they serve solely as impedance matchers, voltage dividers, etc.  The general idea is that the Elm chip uses a crystal to generate a composite horizontal and vertical sync signal.  This signal is fed to both the AD724 and the Mega163 (which is located on an STK500 development board).  The Mega163 uses the sync signal to determine when to begin outputting color data to the AD724.  The AD724 takes the color signals from the Mega163 and combines them with the composite sync signal from the Elm chip to form a valid NTSC TV signal.  That signal is then fed to a TV.  The schematic for our project is shown below:


Please see Schematics for a complete diagram of the hardware