Hi everyone, I’m a little nervous of posting here as I have never really been into games but I see this as a great area to try and do something that may be rewarding. I was recently looking at getting (making) an arduino-based game handheld console for a long trip (sadly failed to read from SD card). I looked around a few platforms and the gamebuino/makerbuino suited what I had in my parts drawer. I really like the library aspect of their bootloader/SD combination but I get the feeling that the classic is not an active community at the moment (especially for hackers) and the META is getting into game territory that is a bit too jazzy and serious - especially for the best part of £100. I wonder if they will manage to keep people making games with those screens.
I love the Arduboy 2/ Arduboy Zero discussion. Surprised there’s not been much talk of ESP32 alongside the clamouring for connectivity and memory! I was thinking about doing a PCB for a SAMD based arduboy. Probably a SAMD21g, rather than the 51 series. I was mulling over all the discussion about screens and this one popped into mind. It’s 128x64, daylight readable with its own backlighting and is driven by the UC1701X chip, which is at least supported by u8g2lib so can’t be too hard to make work in the Arduino IDE. I made a breakout for its 1.27mm pitch pins to demo to a friend and I think it is lovely - the pixel size almost adds to the feeling of quality! With the LED backlights it does come in around 5mm thick but I think you could suspend it in a PCB cutout and lose most of that thickness.
So my main questions on this forum are:
- would anyone like to contribute by making pinout suggestions for the SAMD21 (I’m aware there are giant shoulders to stand on here @MLXXXp), including perhaps FFBNW (fitted for but not with) SD card slot and EEPROM chip, headphone jack (well, if the LCD is going to blow the original thickness…), IR LED and receiver, USB C connector. Missed anything major?
- would anyone be interested in working on SW side to a) get it working (probably easy) and b) looking into ways of adding a library for games to be loaded from SD card or EEPROM IC, like gamebuino?
Thanks for reading, here are some pictures of the screen I have (micro SD for scale - it’s out of focus and the screen looks sharper for real; it’s a dark image, not a negative display; the backlight looks much whiter than the photo; the missing pixel is missing in the image file, so not an LCD error).