As previous, I purchased an 8.4” LVDS display from ICOP, the kit manufacturer.  In this article I cover getting the display working working.  There were some issues for which I am got great support from ICOP in resolving.

Display: LCD-AU084-U-SET with touch /  LCD-AU084-SET without touch

Target System:  Vortex86DX- Spark Kit .. in enclosure.  This has VDX-6326-256 single board computerimage

  1. The display was mounted on the top of the box using some plastic mounts. This required routing of the LVDS and the backlight signals through the lid. The backlight circuitry was mounted internally on the lid.
  2. The LVDS cable is provided with the kit.  The connects to the top left of the display and to J31 on the board.
  3. The short backlight power cable is fixed to the bottom left of the board.  This connects to the supplied backlight power supply.
    • The backlight part number is QF38V6.4
  4. The backlight requires a 12V supply that is not available on the board as its powered from a 5V supply.

The out of the box system runs from a 5 volt plug-pack supply with little tolerance for input variation. As a location based game device, a major lonclip_image002ger term objective has been mobility of the system. Therefore there is ultimately a need for battery a based power source. Typically such a system will need step-down regulation or some form switch stable voltage generation. A need arose during implementation for a 12 volt supply for the LCD display backlight.

The solution was to add a M3-ATX picoPSU unit internally to the box. The unit used generates 5V and 12V from an unregulated 7V to 30V input supply. The box was rewired so that the existing 5V input socket takes the nominally 12V input and is connected to the picoPSU device via the existing switch, (remembering to jumper pins 7 and 14 on the ATX plug of the unit).

 

 

  1. In connecting the backlight cables, I carefully consulted all datasheets to make sure that the connections connections were the right way around, apart from the physical polarity of the connections.  Similarly with the LVDS cable the datasheets were consulted.  This was imported on the SBC LVDS socket as the  connector isn’t “physically polarised”.
  2. Note that pages 38 and 39 of the VDX-6326 manual apply to TFT Flat Panel, not the LVDS panel .. this confused me a little
  3. The BIOS has to be “tuned” for the display.  This required a BIOS reflash.  ICOP support supplied this upon request.  I copied it to the root of the drive and booted to DOS from the DOS start menu and then ran the flash.  This wasn’t too hard .. just follow the instructions exactly.
  4. The CE Image required a changed to the video driver from the catalog and build:
    • Choose: Z9s Display Driver: LCD 16 bpp
    • image
  5. The system wouldn’t loadcepc properly: The development machine couldn’t connect to it, couldn’t see it in the download configuration.
    • The loadcepc parameters had to be modified because the display driver used some resources (interrupt and IO memory location) that had a ripple effect upon other devices.
    • In Autoexec.bat, the network device one interrupt had to be changed from 5 to 9 and its memory location from EC00 to DE400.
    • This was determined by viewing the serial debug output from the target when it boots for OS download from the development system.

I checked and double check everything and then started a boot and image download .. and it worked.  Wala!

References:

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