There is a specific pleasure in watching a part get pushed past where its datasheet implies it stops. Aaron Gayle has driven a 1080p DVI signal out of an RP2350, the microcontroller in the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 — a part with nowhere near enough RAM to hold a 1080p frame, which is exactly why the trick works.
Hackaday covered it on September 21, 2026, noting that a 2023 post on the same site had asked whether 1080p from the older RP2040 was feasible at all. It was not; 720p was the ceiling. The answer arrived three years later on the successor chip.
How you output video with no framebuffer
A 1920×1080 frame at even modest colour depth is megabytes. The RP2350 has hundreds of kilobytes. So Gayle does not store the frame.
Instead the firmware generates video scanline by scanline, computing each horizontal line of pixels just in time for the display to consume it and then throwing it away. This is not a new idea — it is precisely how 8-bit home computers of the early 1980s worked, and how the demoscene has been abusing raster timing ever since — but doing it at 1080p rates means the per-line compute budget is brutal. There is no slack. Miss the deadline and the line is garbage.
Two pieces of the RP2350 make it possible. The chip is overclocked to 372 MHz, well past its nominal rate. And it has the HSTX peripheral, a high-speed serial transmitter designed more or less explicitly so this chip can shift out TMDS-encoded DVI without burning every core on bit-banging. HSTX plus the clock headroom is what closes the gap between 720p and 1080p.
The honest caveat
It runs at roughly 30 Hz, not the 60 Hz that “1080p” normally implies. For moving imagery that is a visible difference. For the thing Gayle actually built, it doesn’t matter at all.
What it’s for
The 1080p output is a component of TVtop, a board game project that puts the game board on a television while players interact through their phones over Wi-Fi. An ESP32 handles the wireless side; the RP2350 draws the board.
That context explains the design perfectly. A game board is a mostly-static image with discrete updates — pieces moving, a counter changing. It wants resolution so that text and board detail are crisp on a big screen, and it does not want frame rate, because nothing is animating continuously. Thirty hertz at 1920×1080 is exactly the right corner of the trade space, and it is available on a part that costs about a dollar.
Why this is worth stealing
If you build LED walls, gallery displays, kiosk pieces, or anything else where a screen shows a composed image rather than a video stream, this is a genuinely useful result. The usual answer for “drive an HD display from an installation” is a Raspberry Pi running Linux, which means an SD card that corrupts, a boot sequence, a desktop to suppress, and an OS that can decide to update itself in the middle of your show. A microcontroller with HSTX driving DVI directly boots in milliseconds, has no filesystem to lose, and fails in ways you can reason about.
The firmware is on GitHub.