Gameduino 3X and CircuitPython

This past couple of weeks I have been preparing a Gameduino module for CircuitPython. With it, you can make quite impressive graphics with just a few lines of code. For example you can copy image files directly into the CircuitPython folder, and animate them 


The driver structure looks like this:
panel
These three classes are:

Eve. The base class. It defines every drawing operation that the FT8xx GPUs support. This is a lot like an instruction set for a CPU, except that it draws bitmaps, points, lines etc.

_Gameduino. Does the protocol work: initializing the GPU and handing off command buffers to the hardware FIFO.

Gameduino is the class the the application sees. It adds the SPI transport, which of course is specific to the platform (currently CircuitPython, MicroPython or SPIDriver).


For CircuitPython, parts of the Eve class are implemented in C, rather than Python. This makes a 7X difference to performance.

For other EVE-based panels, like the ones sold by Newhaven and Riverdi, it's an easy matter to replace _Gameduino with an equivalent module to do their specific initialization.

And by splitting out the SPI layer, it's possible to run the protocol over different transports. For example RS-485 and network sockets are both practical ways of driving an EVE-based display.

This is all running very nicely on the Adafruit Metro M4 Express, which has a lot of storage and CPU, as well as hardware floating-point. Here's the test app running on the 4.3" Gameduino 3X, which has a 480x272 panel


and swapping it for the 7" Gameduino 3X "just works" - there's no code to change for the 800x480 resolution:


and finally here it is driving the prototype Gameduino 3X HDMI, at the standard 720p resolution:


More on the HDMI board next week.

Thanks for reading.