Just throught this might be an interesting fit for the beagle board: http://www.engadget.com/2008/10/14/4-3-inch-usb-powered-monitor-asks-will-the-real-nettop-please-s/
This is a USB LCD panel that runs completly off the power of a USB port.
A general question:
I've been intrigued by USB displays for a while and my main concern is
software. USB displays generally come with Windows and perhaps Mac OS
drivers, but what if you want to do your own software? Is the data
stream format published, or does each USB display manufacturer have an
undocumented, proprietary data stream?
There's no official standard for this.
For really tiny displays (up to 128x64 or so), the protocols are based
off old serial LCD standards so they're fairly consistent between
displays. The signals are pretty simple to understand -- draw
character, update bitmap, etc. Here is a project that can drive a lot
of small displays: http://lcdproc.omnipotent.net/
For the larger displays, everyone is doing it differently. There is
at least one type of device supported in Linux by the "sisusb"
driver. You can get some info on this here:
http://www.nslu2-linux.org/wiki/HowTo/AddVGAAdapter
These use a chip called the NET2280 which is a USB to PCI bridge.
Attached to the PCI side is a SiS PCI SVGA chip with 8MB of SDRAM. In
other words, it is much like controlling a standard memory-mapped
video card, only via a USB wrapper.
- Nathan
Thanks, Nathan. Lots of good information there.