- Tue Jun 15, 2010 1:54 pm
#103116
My Shot at making something semi decent
If you don't care about the info and just want to see my current question skip to the bottom
-Background-
Hey,
my names Morgan, and this has been on my list of things i've wanted to do for ages, now, after recently discovering the arduino I believe I'm closer to achieving my goal.
I'm a physics, maths and computing student so I always thought electronics would be easy for me. In retrospect a arrogant and truly wrong view but as a hobby I find it fascinating. So firstly I apologise for any mistakes or misunderstanding because I am pretty new to this. The reason I am posting here is because i've found Sparkfun to be a useful and resourceful place before and as I consider this to be a long term project I thought it wiser to make one continuous post rather than plaguing the forums with odds and ends.
I got into arduino fairly recently and have been nothing but impressed. my first few simple projects have been a reasonable success and have inspired me to shoot straight to my goal.
-The Project-
The final aim of my project is to have a hand-held device that has input (controls), output (screen) and changeable media ( e.g like different games or programmes)
-Progress-
So far I have only just been researching my project, like I said I'm new to it so I'm not sure on the right ways to go about it.
but so far:
-Screen-
At first i was using two 8*8 bi colour led matrices with a 8-bit shift register for each one. This was part of a previous project that was part of my fiddeling with electronics and seemed ideal at the time. however a 16*8 dualcolor screen is a bit pathetic, not to mention with there current setup the amount of I/O 's they take up (im aware of ways to reduce this).
However I think I have changed my mind. Although I had heard of LCDs before, due to the amount of projects I saw using them and the amount of different tutorials on LCD's that only use characters I thought they were only for text and have only recently found this out to be false (embaressing).At first I was put of by the complexity and price of some of them, but have found this screen
It seems cheap with a lot of support and a decent enough resolution, its small but better than nothing? has anyone had any experience or trouble with this or can suggest a better or more suited product?
-Input-
This isn't something i've given a great deal of consideration to, a few buttons and a dpad or analog stick shouldn't give me too much hassle and haven't seen it as so important in the early stages. also a power switch shouldn't be much trouble either.
-Sound-
After experimenting with sound and some research ive come to the conclusion anything other than monotone tunes is going to be expensive and hard. I would love to have sound effects and other audio but it just seems a lot of trouble and space used. If anyone has info to the contrary I would be very appreciative.
-Cartridges and basic design-
This was causing me the most headaches.
My original ideas and designs were to just use one arduino, it would be a squeeze but I figured it would fit. However, after my experience with matrices and trying to light individual pixels has shown me that I am pretty inefficient and its hard to coincide it with other things and if the arduino has enough speed to keep the display looking seamless and run audio and input. I am not sure if I would have the same trouble with the screen though? Using this idea I still had the problem of cartridges. my inital thought was to use some sort of flash memory like usb sticks or memory cards to store the programmes that would be loaded as the arduinos sketch. I researched a little and found a few very confusing posts on the idea and believe it to be way out of my league.
recently had another idea...I saw this http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/video-game3.htm] animation about how viedogames work. Now I know that's a console and i'm pretty sure i've got the wrong end of the stick here.
My most recent idea is to use several Atmega 328's in the device. say one for sound + input and one for the screen. Then again another one in the cartridge. the idea being the cartridge sends serial data to the other two depending on what it wants or needs and receives data from the inputs. This I will admit to not doing much research on yet so am not sure I am making much sense. O do however know you can buy the chips with the arduino bootloaders on for much cheaper than a whole arduino so believe it could be relatively cheap.
As for a case, I don't think its really important until the actual electronics are sorted out. However my school has a lot of resources both software and hardware so i'm pretty sure it shouldn't be a problem
-Questions-
I am going to display my current problems and questions in Red but will still keep resolved ones in Green to help other people with similar problems.
-->Should I use this screen? Im fairly sure it'l fit my needs but have never used a LCD before. anyone have any experiences with it?
I have instead chosen this screen and have it sitting on my desk now.
--> with the above screen that I have purchased I have had several problems, the screen itself seems fairly good the problem is that It is near impossible to get any help with especially as the only tutorials or librys are for an outdated arduino firmware. I did however manage to find one library. this seems to work however i have a strange refresh problem and encounter several different problems with unexpected drawing or slow response. does anyone have any info or a direction you could point me in to learn or understand how the interaction between an arduino and a screen like this works?
-->My current ideas on design are a bit of a novices stab in the dark
Is using several arduino's feasible?
Can they be used in the structure i've outlined or am I missing something obvious
Also I know I can get the atmega's without all the other stuff, but will that work? as in what other parts would I need? and could I just plug it into my other arduino to upload the sketch and then remove it replacing the original chip?
Any other comments, warnings, advice or opinions on my project are gladly received and would be very appreciated.
Finally I'd like to note i have put research into this, apart from in the parts stated, but I am a student and this is only a hobby, so sorry if i've missed something obvious or asked a question that's already been answered.
Thanks alot!
If you don't care about the info and just want to see my current question skip to the bottom
-Background-
Hey,
my names Morgan, and this has been on my list of things i've wanted to do for ages, now, after recently discovering the arduino I believe I'm closer to achieving my goal.
I'm a physics, maths and computing student so I always thought electronics would be easy for me. In retrospect a arrogant and truly wrong view but as a hobby I find it fascinating. So firstly I apologise for any mistakes or misunderstanding because I am pretty new to this. The reason I am posting here is because i've found Sparkfun to be a useful and resourceful place before and as I consider this to be a long term project I thought it wiser to make one continuous post rather than plaguing the forums with odds and ends.
I got into arduino fairly recently and have been nothing but impressed. my first few simple projects have been a reasonable success and have inspired me to shoot straight to my goal.
-The Project-
The final aim of my project is to have a hand-held device that has input (controls), output (screen) and changeable media ( e.g like different games or programmes)
-Progress-
So far I have only just been researching my project, like I said I'm new to it so I'm not sure on the right ways to go about it.
but so far:
-Screen-
At first i was using two 8*8 bi colour led matrices with a 8-bit shift register for each one. This was part of a previous project that was part of my fiddeling with electronics and seemed ideal at the time. however a 16*8 dualcolor screen is a bit pathetic, not to mention with there current setup the amount of I/O 's they take up (im aware of ways to reduce this).
However I think I have changed my mind. Although I had heard of LCDs before, due to the amount of projects I saw using them and the amount of different tutorials on LCD's that only use characters I thought they were only for text and have only recently found this out to be false (embaressing).At first I was put of by the complexity and price of some of them, but have found this screen
It seems cheap with a lot of support and a decent enough resolution, its small but better than nothing? has anyone had any experience or trouble with this or can suggest a better or more suited product?
-Input-
This isn't something i've given a great deal of consideration to, a few buttons and a dpad or analog stick shouldn't give me too much hassle and haven't seen it as so important in the early stages. also a power switch shouldn't be much trouble either.
-Sound-
After experimenting with sound and some research ive come to the conclusion anything other than monotone tunes is going to be expensive and hard. I would love to have sound effects and other audio but it just seems a lot of trouble and space used. If anyone has info to the contrary I would be very appreciative.
-Cartridges and basic design-
This was causing me the most headaches.
My original ideas and designs were to just use one arduino, it would be a squeeze but I figured it would fit. However, after my experience with matrices and trying to light individual pixels has shown me that I am pretty inefficient and its hard to coincide it with other things and if the arduino has enough speed to keep the display looking seamless and run audio and input. I am not sure if I would have the same trouble with the screen though? Using this idea I still had the problem of cartridges. my inital thought was to use some sort of flash memory like usb sticks or memory cards to store the programmes that would be loaded as the arduinos sketch. I researched a little and found a few very confusing posts on the idea and believe it to be way out of my league.
recently had another idea...I saw this http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/video-game3.htm] animation about how viedogames work. Now I know that's a console and i'm pretty sure i've got the wrong end of the stick here.
My most recent idea is to use several Atmega 328's in the device. say one for sound + input and one for the screen. Then again another one in the cartridge. the idea being the cartridge sends serial data to the other two depending on what it wants or needs and receives data from the inputs. This I will admit to not doing much research on yet so am not sure I am making much sense. O do however know you can buy the chips with the arduino bootloaders on for much cheaper than a whole arduino so believe it could be relatively cheap.
As for a case, I don't think its really important until the actual electronics are sorted out. However my school has a lot of resources both software and hardware so i'm pretty sure it shouldn't be a problem
-Questions-
I am going to display my current problems and questions in Red but will still keep resolved ones in Green to help other people with similar problems.
-->Should I use this screen? Im fairly sure it'l fit my needs but have never used a LCD before. anyone have any experiences with it?
I have instead chosen this screen and have it sitting on my desk now.
--> with the above screen that I have purchased I have had several problems, the screen itself seems fairly good the problem is that It is near impossible to get any help with especially as the only tutorials or librys are for an outdated arduino firmware. I did however manage to find one library. this seems to work however i have a strange refresh problem and encounter several different problems with unexpected drawing or slow response. does anyone have any info or a direction you could point me in to learn or understand how the interaction between an arduino and a screen like this works?
-->My current ideas on design are a bit of a novices stab in the dark
Is using several arduino's feasible? Can they be used in the structure i've outlined or am I missing something obvious
Also I know I can get the atmega's without all the other stuff, but will that work? as in what other parts would I need? and could I just plug it into my other arduino to upload the sketch and then remove it replacing the original chip?
Any other comments, warnings, advice or opinions on my project are gladly received and would be very appreciated.
Finally I'd like to note i have put research into this, apart from in the parts stated, but I am a student and this is only a hobby, so sorry if i've missed something obvious or asked a question that's already been answered.
Thanks alot!
Last edited by mog13 on Wed Sep 01, 2010 1:35 pm, edited 1 time in total.
