Firstly I would like to thank the authors for this great project - you rock! I am a high school teacher looking to design a variety of the Arduboy for use in soldering practice and programming lessons for my students. Here is a question I have regarding this project:
Is it fully open source? Or does it have some sort of release lag or proprietary component? If it is open source, it would be nice to see the hardware source files (not just PDF sch or gerbers) and the codebase for the new FX hardware published. It would be easy, for example, to simply change up a few component footprints to make them easier to solder for my students. I am also looking forward to potentially porting the code to a cheaper micro, since we would need to distribute the hardware to students in our program and the cost of ATmegas may become nontrivial over time. So making the sources public (specifically, for the latest hardware and software) would be tremendously helpful.
Sorry if I missed anything, I had a look around the documentation and various other sections on this forum, but couldn’t find for the life of me where the actual, official project is hosted.
There have been a number of teachers come and go from this site- search for education and classroom across the site and you will find a few threads.
Be warned though that by swapping processors or screens you will start to have some compatibility problems. The homemade package removes a lot of the issues by allowing you to select the hardware you have and compile correctly for it however some devices will never be fully compatible. For example, a umber of people have attempted units based on the ATMega328 but found that this cannot run some of the games as it simply has less RAM.
In my opinion, its probably just teasing the kids to make a unit with FX capability but then cripple it with a processor that cannot play half the games!
Crait’s lessons are a great starting point for students to learn. More advanced topics are covered in my Create your own Sideways Scroller lessons. Pick and choose the bits you want to cover.
The main library is maintained here. But if you are using the homemade package, it has been incorporated into that package as it has been modded to support the various hardware configurations.
You will possible want some other libraries to support sound or acessing the FX chip.
Thanks! I’m currently trying to tackle the hardware side of things before I get into software. For this electronics fabrication class we plan to develop an alternative version of the hardware using more beginner friendly components (1206 size or thru hole) and maybe use the qfp version of the chip instead of qfn. But to do that, I would at least need to get a copy of the latest schematics first.
I did see that as well while I was browsing earlier… Though it seems to be an earlier version of the hardware lacking the external flash chip which contains the 200+ game library.
