The P42 Pico-Video4 Rev1 supports PAL and NTSC systems

A Pi Pico RP2040 board with 4x NTSC/PAL video output; 8 inputs and switched 5 – 12 V, 100mA power

The P42 Pico-Video4 Rev1, a Raspberry Pi Pico-based board, provides video output with all the necessary components built in. Measuring 85mm x 100mm, this compact stand-alone board supports the analog television encoding systems PAL and NTSC, ensuring compatibility with most devices worldwide. As a versatile stand-alone board, it can be used in various applications, including educational tools, embedded systems, and automation displays.

Overview of P42 Pico-Video4 Rev1’s Microcontroller and Core Features

The P42 Pico-Video4 Rev1’s microcontroller, the Rasberry Pi Pico, has dual ARM Cortex-M0+ cores with a working frequency of 133 MHz. It has 264 KB of SRAM and supports up to 16 MB of off-board flash memory with a QSPI bus. Additionally, it has a DMA controller to provide direct memory access to peripherals and a fully connected AHB crossbar to facilitate high-speed data transfers between cores and peripherals. Moreover, interpolator and integer divider peripherals provide functionality for signal processing.

The P42 Pico-Video4 Rev1 has separate 2 MB of memory connected to the microcontroller via SPI. The memory comes with some pre-loaded data: 752 bytes of stored characters for text display (94 characters each, 8 bytes), 8192 bytes of 8 frames of BoingBall demo (32×32 bytes), 8 demo images, and an image buffer of 131072 bytes each, 118784 bytes of a BMP image, leaving 740,113 bytes of storage. Further, it has 512KB (4x128KB, 128KB of each channel) of video buffer memory on the video controller chip VLSI VS23S040.

The VLSI VS23S040 video controller chip is what gives the video output capabilities to the P42 Pico-Video4 Rev1 board. VLSI VS23S040 is capable of generating four independent composite video outputs. It supports several resolutions in NTSC and PAL formats. The display resolution ranges from 320×200 with 65536 colors to 720×576 with less colors. VS23S040 has support for 8-bit and 16-bit color depth, giving the user a total of 256 to 65536 colors to work with. The VS23S040 includes internal processing capabilities like data manipulation and graphic tiles, which increase the output quality and rendering speed. To modify the resolution, aspect ratio, and color depth, the library defines parameters like XPIXELS and YPIXELS. It uses the YUV color space, which has different spaces for brightness. You can find more about this video controller chip in its datasheet.

Comprehensive Connectivity and Software Compatibility of P42 Pico-Video4 Rev1

The P42 Pico-Video4 Rev1 has various ports to increase video output and connectivity functionality. It can support up to four analog composite video outputs. Which is available via an RCA connector for older displays. Additionally, it has a VGA DB15-HD connector, making it compatible with VGA monitors and projectors. Besides this, it has ports to power the board, a type-C port that provides a 5 V input, and a barrel connector providing 5 V to 12 V of input voltage. A SWD debug interface for programming and debugging purposes. It also has an I2C connection, making it compatible with some other multimedia devices as well.

The P42 Pico-Video4 Rev1, being a Raspberry Pi Pico-based board, is compatible with several software environments and programming languages. It can be programmed in MicroPython, but C/C++ is preferred, as predefined libraries and functions, along with their use cases, are mentioned in the datasheet itself.

The P42 Pico-Video4 Rev1 board based on Raspberry-Pi Pico can support upto 4 composite video outputs thanks to the dual ARM Cortex-M0+ cores and the VLSI VS23S040 video controller chip.

The board is available at Tindie at $42. There’s much more information available in the Datasheet that you can check out.

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