Wikipedia Reader Using NXP ARM Cortex M0 Processor

Overview

The project is built on NXP ARM Cortex microcontroller LPC114 in order to create an offline reader of Wikipedia that renders offline xml dumps onto readable text formats.

Details

An inexpensive touch screen LCD based on ILI9325 is used to display the information as the microcontroller contains 32K flash and 8K SRAM while running at 72MHz. the microcontroller is cheap and consists of Eclipse based tools and Serial Wire Debug. A Micro SD card is used to store the dumps before being displayed. Although the PCD uses LPC1114 Cortex M0, it can handle a LPC13XX Cortex M3 with full speed USB.

The xml dumps from Wikipedia and other sources are converted by an offline grinder tool software into a compressed text layout format that is digestible on a small device. Decompressing and drawing the text with few cycles is the hard part especially if there is very little RAM fast enough for it to feel like a responsive little consumer electronics device rather than a lumbering PC. A special index is the key to the operation where fast rendering of segment of a page is allowed along with a simplified compression.