Optimizing GIF Playback For Microcontrollers
Despite being cooked up by Compuserve back in the late 1980s, GIFs have seen a resurgence on the modern internet, mostly because they’re fun. However, all our small embedded systems are getting color screens these days, and they’d love to join in the party. [Larry Bank] has whipped up a solution for just that reason, letting embedded systems play back short animated GIFs with limited resources.
[Larry] does a great job of explaining how the GIF format works, using LZW compression and variable-length codes. He talks about how the design of the format presents challenges, particularly when working with microcontrollers. Despite this, the final code works well, and is able to work with most animated GIFs of the right dimensions and construction. 24K of RAM is required, and image width is limited to 320 pixels. Images can be loaded from flash, memory, or SD cards, and he notes that best performance is gained with a microcontroller with fast SPI for writing to screens quickly.
It’s a great piece of software that promises to add a lot of charm, or silliness, to microcontroller projects. It also simplifies the use of animations, which can now be designed on computers rather than by using onboard graphics libraries. GIF really is the format that never seems to die; we’ve featured cameras dedicated to the form before. Video after the break.
[original story: Hack a Day]