It’s truly a testament to the huge computational power we’ve seen come to less expensive microcontrollers over the last years that many of them can generate video signals on the fly. The Pico has recently been used to directly generate DVI for HDMI signalling, and many other microcontrollers can generate VGA using a simple resistor ladder DAC. However, controlling six VGA displays at the same time truly is absolute madness!
In the past few years, an application like this would almost certainly have been done with an FPGA using six VGA design blocks, with a very fast serial interface to a microcontroller to get the display information. The fact that a single ESP32 can do this is truly remarkable and is a testament to the hardware and software skills of bitluni.
Why would you want to control 6 VGA displays at the same time? Well, other than it just being a super cool challenge, you could use the inexpensive ESP32 to generate a large 3×2 tiled screen for message display — bezels can sometimes be an issue in these applications, so your options are to look for VGA displays with tiny bezels or remove the bezels altogether and 3D print a custom retaining bracket for all the display guts.
It looks like there are only a few of these available due to parts shortages right now, but we are really hoping to see a future version released here! bitluni also has a few other VGA-related boards on their store page, so make sure to check them out if you miss out on this batch of the VGA Madness boards.
