Screen Swap?

[zoreta]

Hello Gameduino,

I have a Gameduino with the 5 inch screen, which is wonderful except for the screen only being 5 inches. I wanted to know if (and how) it would be possible to switch to a larger screen. The shield offerings on Excamera are out of stock and have been for a long time, but all my graphics code is written for Gameduino so I am reluctant to abandon the Gameduino shield. As far as I can tell, the 7 inch versions are discontinued and cannot be found for sale anywhere.

Has anyone had success using Gameduino's graphics code on a different touchscreen+shield? Has anyone had success taking one of the Gameduino that has an attached touch screen, and swapping to a 3rd party screen? Any advice would be appreciated! I see 7 inch screens such as this one on adafruit (https://www.adafruit.com/product/2354), but I am not familiar enough with their recommended driver (https://learn.adafruit.com/ra8875-touch-display-driver-board) to know if it would be possible to just plug-and-play the GD2 library.

If someone somehow has spare of the 7 inch screens and is willing to sell or swap, please contact me. I would be highly interested.

Best,
Zoreta

[tftlcdcyg]

From what has been seen in recent years, we will no longer have gameduinos larger than 5". To use a screen of 7" or larger with the library for gameduino2/3/x, some adjustments must be made in the library.

The necessary condition is that the new screen has an FT81x (FT810, FT811, FT812, FT813) or BT8x (BT815, BT816, BT817, BT818) driver. My favorites are the FT813 or the BT817, which have worked directly with the library.

Except in two issues:
- Use of the BT81x series flash memory
- Multitouch

In both cases some approximations were achieved, it remained in several experiments that were not incorporated into the GD2-library.

Another aspect that was mentioned to the Master James was the fact of using faster libraries capable of accessing much faster and larger capacity microSD exFAT memories.

I understand that he wanted to maintain compatibility for the AVR (arduino UNO/MEGA) ecosystem. Some of us fans opted to take that path, starting from its magnificent library. There are many developers who consider that the GD2 library works like a miracle... but they don't see any further. James used another approach with the SPI library, a more sophisticated one, not so easy to digest for the rigorous eyes of C++ experts, but which in practice resulted in the GD2 library; which allows using the EVEx chip registers in a friendlier programming environment and much easier to implement than with libraries based on those created by FTDI chip for FT800/FT801.

This is part of the response I received from FTDI support, on 11/24/2015, I keep the email, since it motivated me to investigate if it was possible to use GD2 with a 7" Riverdi FT813 screen and some others like a 3.5", 4.3" and 5" NHD, on rare boards like an M4Demo (STM32F407) or a teensy 3.6...

"I’m afraid we don’t have any Arduino libraries at this time for the EVE2 devices. Our new demo boards are based around our new FT900 MCU in most cases, rather than the VM80xP plus boards.

Since the EVE2 is still an SPI peripheral in the same way as the original EVE, it is still possible to use it with an Arduino platform and it will work in much the same way. However, EVE2 does have a different register map and some additional commands and so this would require some development of the library code to add support."

Since then I have dedicated my free time to exploring how far we can go with GD2 to use other EVEx screens, exFAT memories (canvas Go Plus) with SdFat-V2; Faster MCUs like the RPi-Pico, teensy 4, teensy 4.1, STM32F767 or STM32F746.

In these cases, the gameduino shield is starting to become somewhat uncomfortable to use since the explored MCUs and EVEx screens do not have the arduino UNO format.