Pi Supply Gert VGA 666 - Hardware VGA for Raspberry Pi
The Gert VGA 666 (6 bits per colour channel, hence 666) is a breakout/add on board for the Raspberry Pi Model B+ and Raspberry Pi 2 (will not work with Model A/B as the additional GPIO pins on the Model B+ are required).
It is an open source hardware design recently released publicly by Gert van Loo whom was one of the hardware engineers that was instrumental in the initial design of the original Raspberry Pi (also one of the chip architects on the BCM2835 chip at the heart of the Raspberry Pi) and someone that many of you may have spoken to at Raspberry Jams or on the Raspberry Pi forums.
It is a neat and very useful solution for using a VGA screen/monitor with your Raspberry Pi and is far cheaper than an HDMI to VGA adapter or similar. The VGA connection is driven natively in hardware over the GPIO pins (using a parallel interface) and uses around the same CPU load as the HDMI connection on board. It is capable of displaying 1080p60 VGA video with no CPU load. It is also possible to drive this interface at the same time as the HDMI connection, so a dual screen set up is also possible.
Please Note. This add on board uses all but 6 of the GPIO pins on the Model B+ Raspberry Pi so it may not be possible to use other add on boards at the same time as the VGA adapter.
GERT VGA 666 Kit Contents:
1 x Gert VGA 666 PCB
1 x 40 pin GPIO header connector
1 x 15 pin female VGA connector
20 x through hole resistors (2*120 Ohm, 3*499 ohm, 3*1kOhm, 3*2kOhm, 3*4kOhm, 3*8kOhm, 3*16kOhm)
2 x Pi Supply Stickers
Tutorials
Full design files, schematics and other details are available on GitHub.
