Many consumer products now feature colourful graphical displays and touch capability. And, RF-based remote controls are becoming more prevalent; as they provide bi-directional communication and work through walls (no line-of-sight communication is required). Microchip’s remote-control demo is in the form factor of a wireless remote control, but it can also be used as a reference design to build any type of application that requires a graphical display, touch sensing, USB and/or wireless capability. The demo is supported by free source code that customers can use to customize for various graphical screens or touch-button scenarios. The MRF24J40 transceiver can be used with the 2.4 GHz RF4CE, ZigBee or MiWi™ protocols, depending upon the wireless needs of the end application. The demo showcases how a vivid colour display application can use a low cost PIC24 MCU with integrated graphics driver, utilizing only the on-chip RAM to eliminate the cost of external memory.
The Remote Control Demo Board with ZENA wireless adapter (part # DM240315-2) can be purchased today, for $249.99.