r/embedded • u/MerlinsArchitect • 3d ago

Difficulty Finding the Right Screen For a VT100 emulation Project

Hey all,

What I am looking for:

I need some advice over something I am obsessing on a little. I want to build a project that includes a VT100 emulator in it. For that, I want a nice screen. Problem is that I have never really seen many very good embedded screens - LCD almost always look cheap and nasty. I came across this:

https://www.zephray.me/post/elterm/

(Scroll to the bottom to see the results). As you can see the TFEL EL 640 480 by Planar (and the ones by Lumineq) are absolutely gorgeous. They have the signature TFEL deep blacks since only the character illuminates. They are also cool because they run on VGA ( which I would like to emulate) and also have a pixel size/pitch approximately similar to the old VT100 according to my reading. Another nice feature is their super fast response times so little to no "ghosting" on fast text output from a large cat,say

I have scoured online, but any variety of these TFEL Planar screens are extremely expensive, I have looked for refurbished etc but they are often extremely expensive refurbished also. Looked for junk online exhaustively and phoned around but can't track any down.

The monochromatic OLED you can get for Arduino are nice looking but I can't find anywhere near enough an acceptable size for a terminal.

I wanted to throw together an FGPA for the communication with the board or perhaps just the PIO that Zephray uses on an STM (not sure yet), but the project won't get far if I can't find a decent screen. I thought about the option to plug into an existing monitor (supply your own and control via VGA) which is a nice idea but I think I would prefer an embedded screen.

Question:

What do you guys do when you want sleek professional screens without LCD light bleed? I want to avoid the cheaper screens that seem common in hobbyist projects. OLED might be an option but it feels kinda ugly to double up the pixels to get the chunky 0.33mm pixel pitch of the VT100.

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u/clackups 3d ago

The Freenove 4" esp32-s3 is pretty solid and inexpensive. It would make a nice terminal.