I noticed that 4D systems has a new interesting little $49 VGA controller breakout board the uVGA-II. It has a TTL serial interface with their Picaso chip. Has anyone tried it with mbed yet?

uVGA II manual and commands

I assume since it appears to be the same VGA controller chip, that the existing mbed 4D SGC library could be used or adapted. You should be able to use any VGA monitor or there are a number of nice small VGA monitors (7 to 12 inch) with a touch screen that are sold in the car aftermarket for use in in-car PCs that should work well with this VGA board on mbed projects.

mp3Car has a large assortment of small touch screen LCDs such as this 7 inch LED LCD model 705TSV from Xenarc. I have used this one in some other projects. A number of them have standard VGA inputs and even internal speakers. This Xenarc monitor runs around $225. Touch input still costs a bit extra, but it is nice to have. The touch screen data typically is sent out over a USB port, so that would take some work to use with mbed. At least they seem to have some info on it in this manual. These monitors are so small that they probably need to be attached to something to use the touch input or they move.

Just got the new 4D VGA breakout, connected 5 wires, plugged into a VGA monitor and ran the demo program in the mbed cookbook at 4D SGC library demo. It ran the first time. Needs only a 5V,gnd,TX,RX and reset(optional?) connection.

mbed program output on a VGA monitor

Need to look at higher res modes next.

Just got 640 by 480 mode working. Posted code and details in the cookbook at uVGA II.

Would have been a few hours earlier....but the manual said the command used to switch res to 640 by 480 mode was "12hex" and it is 12 decimal.

P.S. They just posted a new manual today at the web site with the corrections in it.