TV Display Chip

[zadok]

I've been working for some time (far too long!) on a single chip solution to display energy monitoring results to a TV (see photos).

It crossed my mind that as this display can cope with up to 1,000 alpha-numeric characters, including multiple bar graphs etc, far more than an alpha-numeric LCD panel, the chip might be useful to other people who are finding an LCD panel a bit cramped. Despite searching for weeks before I started the project, I couldn't find a suitable off-the-shelf display chip, so decided (unwisely in terms of the work involved) to do my own.

I was thinking of maybe offering the chip with a single wire serial input so it could also be used with radio links, infra red etc. As it would only use one I/O, even connection to a lowly 8 pin micro would give a useful display, and may be useful for debugging and testing at least. Its already got built in binary to decimal with floating point, bar graph display function and hex dump for debugging.

Maybe other people know if such a type of chip already exists. The only ones I could find were not really suitable; black & white only with characters which were too wide and too much of a gap in between the characters.

I'm just floating the idea to see if anyone thinks it would be useful to them.

If so, any comments?

Graham.

PS The photos are direct camera shots of a TV screen and for some reason turn out a bit blurred. The actual clarity is better than this.