Serial to VGA monitor conversion?

Other Hardware Displays
1

I have searched for a converter to send serial to a VGA monitor,
but have had no luck.

Does anyone know of one, that's not to pricy ?

In the olden days, most all monitors would read serial RS232, but, now days things are a bit different.

2

Hi Jack,

Check out - http://www.microvga.com/ - it might be the one you're looking for.

esp. http://www.microvga.com/arduino

I used one some time ago in a project successfully

3

In the olden days, most all monitors would read serial RS232,

No, they were called terminals not monitors.

4

There were terminals and there were monitors.
The main difference between the two was that:

the terminals had keyboards to be able to send out RS232 communications as well as had a CRT to display incoming RS232.

the monitors had no keyboard, so could only display the incoming RS232 communications on the CRT.

I do not want a keyboard, nor do I want a CRT.

5

the terminals had keyboards to be able to send out RS232 communications as well as had a CRT to display incoming RS232.

Correct.

the monitors had no keyboard,

Yes

so could only display the incoming RS232 communications on the CRT.

No. Monitors had only video inputs, either composite video or component video for colour.

I have searched for a converter to send serial to a VGA monitor, but have had no luck.

That will be a VDU emulator then. Terminals or VDUs were not capable of VGA formats:-

To turn a VGA display into a terminal or VDU you need electronics that translates the incoming RS232 into characters and then stores those characters in a memory that is being scanned out at video ( VGA ) frequencies. These normally had a character generator chip or ROM that converted the stored ASCII into the bit patterns needed to display this on a monitor.

I designed and built many of these in the 70s and some were even commercial products I sold through my own company. This was before the advent of micro computers, but when micro computers did come along they were the ideal way to communicate with them.

While you can cut down on the amount of logic chips needed to make one, these days I reckon the cheapest option for making a VDU is to buy a Raspberry Pi.

6

Grumpy_Mike:
I designed and built many of these in the 70s and some were even commercial products I sold through my own company. This was before the advent of micro computers, but when micro computers did come along they were the ideal way to communicate with them.

6545 comes to mind ...