Two launches today: SPIDriver and a bigger Gameduino 3

2018-06-12

SPIDriver is happening

Hooray, SPIDriver launched today. You can now officially watch the video, read about it, and maybe even back it!

https://www.crowdsupply.com/excamera/spidriver

Please tell anyone who might be remotely interested -- thanks.
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SPIDriver is the first fruit of my effort to, as it were, get much better at making hardware. It's also proved really useful in itself. If you have a Gameduino 3, SPIDriver runs every example sketch on the PC. No Arduino required. The Arduino emulation code in gd2-lib is here.

A new Gameduino 3

Last November Gameduino 3 launched with a 4.3" screen. Many people have asked about a larger screen for their games and applications. In particular, vehicle dashboard people want a 7" screen. Starting today the GD3 7" is in the excamera store. It's identical to the existing 4.3" GD3, except that it has a 7" 800x480 resistive touch screen. This is about 3X the screen area, so you can fit a lot more in. Like the smaller version, it runs in all four orientations. It looks great, and thanks to the FT810's 16X anti-aliasing, you could easily mistake it for a much higher resolution.

These units are just a short run to gauge interest. Stock is limited right now.

Gameduino 3 automatically sets itself up for the attached display panel. It means that there is nothing to change in your source code to run on different panels, apart from the larger screen. Many of the examples run fine at 800x480 with no change at all.

This is all done by the on-board configuration flash, which sets up the display parameters at boot. As a programmer, you don't need to set up the video timing registers for 480x272 or 800x480. Each Gameduino variant knows how to set itself up. This trick is made possible by a small I²C EEPROM hooked up to the two GPIO lines of the EVE GPU. Software in the GD library reads out the contents of this flash, and feeds it back to the GPU as setup commands. At manufacture, we load this flash with the appropriate setup sequence for its display.

Coming soon

Believe it or not, this is a legitimate test case for the next new thing...