A kegerator and a motorcycle

This week I'm talking about a couple of related projects, not my own work at all. Both use the GD2 library to drive an FT81x EVE GPU. The library is the software part of the Gameduino 3 - but it's really a general purpose API for the FT81x "EVE" graphics chips.

First is the Sunflower Shield, currently in its last week on Kickstarter, being run by Paul Bartek. Paul sent me a sample a few days ago, and I've been porting the GD library to it and trying out the peripherals. The shield is beautifully designed and constructed, and everything works really well. The 320x240 screen is bright and clear, and the digital thermocouple interface is accurate to 0.25 C.

Boiling water, electronics, hands -- what could go wrong?
There are relay outputs and a microSD slot, so obvious applications are temperature-based control and logging. There's an included speaker for audible alarms. The Sunflower Shield's demo application is a kegerator GUI.

Kegerator
The graphics are driven by an FT813, part of the same family as the FT810 in the Gameduino 3. The screen has a capacitive multi-touch panel, so fancy user interfaces are possible. The whole thing is open source, very nicely executed, and I'm really pleased to (a) have one and (b) be supporting it in the GD library.


The second project is a dashboard for a motorcycle.  Simon Hilton has been working on it for several months.
This image was deleted by MailChimp when they shut down TinyLetter.
It's Simon's personal project, though as you can probably guess he is a professional graphic designer.

The hardware is a 800x480 screen being driven by an FT812 and an STM32F407. The original elements were made in Adobe Photoshop, converted using gd3asset, then animated using custom code that Simon wrote on top of the GD2 library. The rotated text is being drawn using this font converted with gd3asset, with some code for bitmap rotation.

This is an early animation test video:
Early animation test
Here is the startup animation.

And the odometer rolling over.

Simon is currently available for freelance work. Reply to this email and I'll put you in touch.

It's great to see the GD library being used -- especially in new applications like these. Most of the active discussion of it happens on the GD2/3 forums, and I try to check in daily to see what people are doing and answer any questions.