HMIs offer bright displays for industrial applications

5th September 2016

Mick Elliott

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The mikromedia HMI smart displays from MikroElektronika are now on offer at Mouser Electronics. Developed with Riverdi displays and FTDI Chip's graphic controllers, these human machine interface (HMI) boards are a spinoff from the original feature-rich mikromedia multimedia development board.

Optimised for scale, and removing all excessive circuitry from the original mikromedia to lower cost, these new HMI products retain only the essential components that simplify its integration into a final product line consisting of 18 stand-alone smart displays.

The products range from 3.5 inches to 7 inches, offer multiple screen options (capacitive or resistive touchscreen, or bright displays with no touchscreen layer), and come in pixel resolutions up to 800×480.

The displays are powered by an FTDI Chip FT900Q — a 32-bit embedded microcontroller based on a proprietary RISC architecture and engineered for high-speed, interface bridging tasks.

The 100MHz (3.1 DMIPS/MHz) FT900Q microcontroller offers excellent interconnect capabilities with fast data rates, and features 256 KBytes of flash memory and a parallel camera input.

The FT90x hardware is fully compatible with mikroC, mikroBasic, and mikroPascal compiler software as well as the Visual TFT graphic user interface (GUI) design software, all of which are available from Mouser.

Driving the mikromedia HMI displays are FTDI Chip’s FT81x embedded video engine (EVE) devices, a series of easy-to-use graphic controllers targeted at embedded applications to generate high-quality HMIs.

Combining a high-brightness colour display on the front, with a powerful FT900Q 32-bit microcontroller with additional essential circuitry on the back, MikroElektronika’s mikromedia HMI smart displays are cost-effective solutions for use as standalone OEM parts to power a broad array of industrial Internet of Things (IoT) applications.