Remote display - testers?

[jamesbowman]

If anyone has the Arduino Ethernet board and a few minutes to spare, perhaps they could run this sketch. It needs an outside internet connection

excamera.com/files/tcpdev.ino

it should display a ticking clock... the interesting part is that the display commands are being generated on the server; the Arduino continuously fetches commands and feeds them into the GD2.

J.

[yobi]

Hi James,

Works perfect.
Shows a clock, day, day and time.

Jos

[hla]

I guess this can be used to speed up development time significantly ?
Not having to download a new sketch each time you have a small graphical adjustment to do ?

Or did I miss something ?

/Helge

[hla]

Any links to the server side software ?

[ray]

Didn't work at first. Turns out I have an early Ethernet Shield without the SPI bus fix on it - it leaves the Wiznet W5100 MISO line enabled all the time, preventing the GD2 from communicating properly. Added an inverter to drive the SEN line from the select pin (like the newer designs), uploaded the sketch, and it came right up.

Disconnecting the net connection for a while and reconnecting causes the clock to "fast forward" to the current time - very cool! Where's that being done, on the server?

[jamesbowman]

Yes, the server (in California) is sending out the drawing commands once per second. All the Arduino is doing is passing the drawing commands to the GPU. So the server could actually send out anything - pictures, animations, etc.

Here is the server code:


from twisted.internet import reactor, protocol
from twisted.internet.task import LoopingCall

from gameduino2.base import GD2
import gameduino2.registers as reg
import time
from datetime import datetime

class remoteGD2(GD2):
   def __init__(self):
       self.buf = []
       self.cmd_dlstart()

   def c(self, s):
       self.buf.append(s)

   def swap(self):
       self.Display()
       self.cmd_swap()
       self.cmd_dlstart()

   def flush(self):
       r = "".join(self.buf)
       self.buf = []
       return r

class Clock(protocol.Protocol):
   def connectionMade(self):
       self.g = remoteGD2()
       lc = LoopingCall(self.tick)
       lc.start(1.0)

   def tick(self):

       tm = datetime.now()

       g = self.g
       g.cmd_gradient(0, 0, 0x101010, 480, 272, 0x202060)

       g.cmd_clock(240, 120, 135, reg.OPT_NOBACK, tm.hour, tm.minute, tm.second, 0)
       g.cmd_text(240, 260, 26, reg.OPT_CENTER, tm.strftime("%a, %d %b %Y %T %z"))

       g.swap()

       self.transport.write(g.flush())

def main():
   """This runs the protocol on port 8000"""
   factory = protocol.ServerFactory()
   factory.protocol = Clock
   reactor.listenTCP(8000, factory)
   reactor.run()

if __name__ == '__main__':
   main()



[Gendor]

This is great! The link to the Arduino sketch is broken now. Any chance of making it available again?

[jamesbowman]

It's restored: excamera.com/files/tcpdev.ino

[gendor]

Excellent, it works when I run my own server! Had to wait a couple of days for the stackable headers I ordered to arrive so that I could plug in the Gameduino on top of my Ethernet shield. I can confirm it works without any problems on an Arduino Ethernet Shield R3.

I think this has a lot of potential for rapid prototyping of user interfaces.

[jamesbowman]

The only downside of the thing as it stands is the throughput of the Arduino Ethernet card. It can carry about 10K bytes per second. That's about the same speed as dial-up. With decent speed Ethernet it could run more complex widgets/graphics.