Thursday, May 15, 2008

Nokia 6100 Lcd Linux Driver

This is a Linux driver for the Nokia 6100 compatible LCD screen ( I got mine from Sparkfun Electronics ).
I wanted to get it working with my Viper-Lite development board, which runs Linux. Since I didn't find a driver already available, I figured a take a crack at writing one myself. ssplcd is the driver I ended up with. It is published under the GNU General Public License, without warranty or support.

The Viper-Lite uses a PXA 255 processor, and I do know about the Gumstix driver, which is for Linux and the same processor. But I wanted something more generic, that can be used by applications to access the screen.

My driver is a kernel module (tested with 2.6.24.3) also, but - after it has been loaded - it can be used by applications to access the screen as a file, send ioctl commands to it and write data to it.
It has only been tested with my devel board, using the PXA 255 processor, so I'm not sure about any other kind of hardware. But it should work ok with other PXA 255 based systems, like the Gumstix computers.

Also, my lcd has an Epson controller, so it hasn't been tested with Phillips controllers at all.
There's more information available in the README in the archive.

Download : ssplcd-0.01.tar.gz

I know that the current programming interface is a bit awkward. If I'll have enough time, I want to look into writing a different, framebuffer driver for the same device.

Update: you may also be interested in the linux framebuffer driver here.