Piotr Esden-TempskiAs the boards are now in production it is time to turn my attention back to some software. The boards will probably arrive here around July 17th so not much time for assembly and software writing between then and DefCon that is happening July 27th-30th.
I had a test board for the 1Bitsy + LCD before but I gave it away to a potential project contributor, I have quickly soldered together another test setup last night.
As you see, it is actually displaying some graphics already. The amazing @Bob Miller (aka. kbob / kernlbob) has already written a ton of driver code and demos for the 1Bitsy + LCD over parallel. The video might look familiar, this is what I have used in our Kickstarter video. :)
I also got some other examples Bob wrote to run. The munching squares demo is really amazing, I love the effect and all it does is rotate the color palette.
Now I am spending some time reading Bob's code and learning what changes and expansions I want to make to provide the type of interface and behavior we would expect on a retro inspired platform. This also means reading through the video subsystem specs of several 8bit handheld game consoles for inspiration. ;-)
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Radomir, you're going to DEFCON too?
Are you sure? yes | no
No. I just got back from EuroPython, and I'm going to PyCon.PL next month. I think I had enough conferences this year, especially since I still have one to attend for my day job.
Are you sure? yes | no
It is an ILI9341, and no it does not support color palette in the chip. It only has a small lookup table to resolve the 16bit color coding that I did not try out yet. Also it does not have to support color palettes in hardware yet. At the moment it is all implemented in software and a future expansion of the system will take care of this kind of things in hardware. Also I have been corrected regarding the munching squares, it is not really a color palette rotation effect.
#define MAGIC 27 // try different values
for (int y = y0; y < y1; y++) {
/* … */
for (int x = x0; x < x1; x++)
*p++ = base + MAGIC * (x ^ y);
}
Are you sure? yes | no
I see, I was hoping for an SPI display with palettes, because that could allow much faster transfer of the image data. That's less of a problem with parallel interface.
Are you sure? yes | no
I didn't know this display supported color palettes. What is the chip on it?
Are you sure? yes | no