An 800 x 600 "GameDuino" shield

[monsonite]

Hi All,

This is my first posting and I should like to tell you about a hardware project I have been developing.

I have taken the latest FT812 EVE IC and put it onto a 50mm x 50mm pcb which has "Arduino compatible" headers and a VGA output.

In principle this is similar to GameDuino 1 - but takes advantage of the latest FTDI FT81x chips - and allows a full 800x600 56Hz SVGA image to be displayed on any VGA compatible monitor - projector or large screen TV which will accept a standard D-sub15 HD VGA cable.

The board also has PS/2 keyboard and mouse inputs, and will work with any development board that offers 3.3V Arduino style headers.  This includes a wide range of mbed compatible boards - such as Nucleo from STM, and boards from NXP, Freescale and Nordic Semiconductor (Bluetooth).

It has a simple SPI interface - and can be used with virtually any 8 bit or 32 bit microcontroller - allowing the addition of colour animated graphics and sound to any small project.

The first board is just a proof of concept - and it served up its first image very early this morning.  The first host was a STM32F407 ARM processor - but I hope to port the GD2 library - so that this be used with Arduino and Arduino "workalikes" 

Future boards will contain a micro SDcard - and possibly a powerful  ARM host processor.

Whilst this is not intended for driving small LCD panels - it is intended for large screen, bold, colourful graphics - and a touch screen could be added later as a pointing device.

 You can read more about it on my blog

The board was designed in EagleCad - and the zipped source and gerber CAD files are attached. The board is 50x50mm - so you can take advantage of some of the very low cost board-house offers.

James Bowman is also experimenting with this pcb - having contacted me for the files and had a few made independently at a cheap Chinese board-house - and he is currently testing them in California.

James is writing some code - so that this can be used with his J1b Forth processor - a derivative of the FPGA soft cpu used on Gameduino 1. 

Please contact me for further details


Happy New Year


Ken

Attachments:

VGA_PS2_shield1.zip (171.18 KB)

[monsonite]

James just reports this evening that he is successfully running his shield at XGA resolution - that's 1024 x 768 @ 60Hz - by some clever tweaking of the chip's timing.

Photo attached

[monsonite]

Here's a quick shot of the 1024 x 768 60Hz image - on the big screen


Happy New Year From London, UK


Ken

[rick]

Hi,

This is really nice! I hope this will be a good successor of the GD1.

I'm curious as to why you are thinking of an ARM host?

[monsonite]

Rick,

This shield is universal - and will work with just about any microcontroller or FPGA. That opens it out to a whole lot of dev boards - from a wide variety of manufacturers - not just Arduino.

The atmel ARM has been used in the Arduino Due, and also the STM32Fxxx series now supports STM32-Duino - so can run the GD2 library.

The reason for the ARM - is that's the way the world is heading. I can buy a 216MHz ARM M7 for not much more than an Arduino - and the boost in performance is phenomenal.

There will be an updated version available in a few weeks time which extends the resolution to XGA  1024 x 768 60Hz  - which has audio, micro SDcard. The board files were just sent off today.


Ken

[rick]

Jan 3, 2016 13:03:21 GMT -8 monsonite said:

Rick,

This shield is universal - and will work with just about any microcontroller or FPGA. That opens it out to a whole lot of dev boards - from a wide variety of manufacturers - not just Arduino.

The atmel ARM has been used in the Arduino Due, and also the STM32Fxxx series now supports STM32-Duino - so can run the GD2 library.

The reason for the ARM - is that's the way the world is heading. I can buy a 216MHz ARM M7 for not much more than an Arduino - and the boost in performance is phenomenal.

There will be an updated version available in a few weeks time which extends the resolution to XGA  1024 x 768 60Hz  - which has audio, micro SDcard. The board files were just sent off today.


Ken

I agree that ARM is the way to go, I'm a happy fan of Teensy's myself

Maybe I misunderstood, but from your post I understood that you wanted to have an ARM on the shield itself.

[jamesbowman]

www.gadgetfactory.net/2016/01/are-we-witnessing-the-birth-of-the-gameduino-3/

[jackroffel]

Add an RTC and make it R3 compatible for SPI and I2C and you have the ultimate I/O shield.

Very interested in finding out more - sounds like something I could use in some projects that I have on the go.

Jack

[monsonite]

Jack,

We are currently discussing the line up of requirements for this shield - over on the Gadget Factory forum.

The following have so far been has proposed for the latest version:

1. SPI chip selects compatible with GD2 for SD and FT812
2. Support for analog joystick and Wii Nunchuck on A0 A1 (Analog) and A4, A5 (I2C)
3. 40 pin FPC connector to allow direct access to all LCD signals to allow plugging a larger LCD (eg 7") or HDMI adaptor
4. RTC - this could be a supercapacitor backed-up MCP74910
5. Support for Li Po cell - for total portability
6. 3 x 2 header and D14, D15 to pick up the R3 I2C and SPI signals
7. Extending the pcb by 0.7" to it's bottom edge would allow a Teensy 3.2 to be plugged in directly - for super compact operation.


Ken

[monsonite]

Hi All,

Since producing the FT812 board in late December, I have produced a matching 50mm x 50mm "Arduino" board using the bigger ATmega1284P, running the standard GD2 library.

This is Arduino compatible but benefits from 128K of program space and 16K of RAM.

This little board replaces "Goldilocks" an ATmega1284 board which sadly is no longer available.

See feilipu.me/2014/01/31/gameduino-2-with-goldilocks-and-eve/

The picture above shows the first test with text sent to my widescreen monitor.


More details in my blog   sustburbia.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/building-winode-5-part-1.html



Ken

Attachments:

[NeX]

we have already discussed this, but i will repeat it here, i think being able to change the resolution in exchange for more programming space would be a good option. i imagine a lot of people using a 7" display, most of which only support 800x600 anyway. otherwise i think this is going to be the best of both worlds. as far as previous gameduinos go