Stefan built his PIX-6T4 kit in one evening and developed “Nom Nom” the following day, successfully putting to the test the PIX-6T4 library and its features.

Great work Stefan! Thank you for this very nice contribution

“Nom Nom” is now included to the games coming with the PIX-6T4 distribution. You can download the source code from \netduino.helpers\Samples\PIX6T4 or in binary format from the PIX-6T4 site.

Cheers,

-Fabien

In a great follow-up to his previous article on assembling the PIX-6T4, Pete Brown puts the console’s rapid game development concept to the test and whips up a racing game in one evening.  Pete does a fantastic job at explaining the design process step-by-step, starting from the game concept all the way to creating  a standalone game ‘cartridge’ for all of us to enjoy. Awesome job Pete and thanks for sharing this excellent tutorial.

Cheers,

-Fabien.

Pete Brown just bought a PIX-6T4 and tells about his experience, from unboxing the kit, all the way to writing his first “Hello World!” application. If you’ve been thinking about getting in on the PIX-6T4 fun, you should really read his post :)

Cheers,

-Fabien.

Imagine a World Without Free Knowledge…

Right now, the U.S. Congress is considering legislation that could fatally damage the free and open Internet.

Quoting from the good people @ Make: “SOPA, “Stop Online Piracy Act” (H.R. 3261), and PIPA, “PROTECT IP Act” (S. 968), are potentially poisonous to many of the things that we stand for as Makers. Not only has the internet had a hugely positive impact on our economy, on innovation, on our culture, and greatly democratized the dissemination of media and information, but it has allowed people from all walks of life and all areas of concern to become publishers, media producers, journalists, educators, doers, makers.”

Here’s what you can do:

1) Learn if your U.S. Representative or Senators support SOPA or PROTECT IP through SOPAOpera.org.

2) Use the tools at AmericanCensorship.org, Engine Advocacy and POPVOX to tell Congress where you stand.

3) Participate in Better Activism Day, a free livestream of experts discussing ways to “improve your power in Washington from people who’ve been successful at moving it.”

PIX-6T4 Kit

It’s been a while since I’ve last posted here… We have been busy over the past few weeks getting our new little startup company off the ground and setting up a marketplace for the PIX-6T4, our very first product

The PIX-6T4 is a complete, yet simple, game console designed to teach budding Hackers and Makers about digital electronics and programming in a fun way. Head over to the PIX-6T4 site to check out the schematics, the source code, the docs, and of course, the step-by-step video tutorial on assembling the kit:

The PIX-6T4 is an entirely Open Source and Open Hardware kit, so you’re free to hack it to your heart’s content or use it as a base for your projects. Be sure to show us what you build with it and we’ll feature your creations and contributions.

Have fun!

Cheers,

-Fabien.

Exciting news! We’re just about ready to launch our PIX-6T4 kits and here’s what they look like assembled

http://www.pix6t4.com/blog/Building-a-mini-RGB-LED-video-wall-using-a-Netduino-and-an-Adafruit-LPD8806-LED-strip

Cheers,

-Fabien.

Cheers,

-Fabien & Bertrand.

Channel 9: http://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun/blog/Building-your-own-hand-held-game-console-with-Netduino-C-and-the-PIX-6T4-project

Since Nyan Cat needed some friends, Hello Kitty and a Space Invader joined in. Eventually, Darth Vader was called in to scare the Nyan Cat away. But I digress…

Connecting the Adafruit ST7565 to the Netduino

The breakout board supporting the LCD display won’t accommodate a standard 0.1″ header unfortunately, so I had to build my own adapter to use it on a breadboard. No big deal but it’s time consuming.

No, really, this is not a squid.

The back of the connector.

The ST7565 is hooked up to the Netduino, ready for development.

The length of the wires that I used for this test were a bit long and limited the communication on the SPI bus to 22 MHz. With shorter connections, this display is capable of supporting much higher speeds, even though the LCD refresh rate can’t keep up at such high speeds and creates ghosting effects between frames.

Pin Connection Map

Here’s the pin mapping I chose from the LCD connector to the Netduino:

• LCD B-: Netduino D5 (PWM) (LED Blue)
• LCD G-: Netduino D6 (PWM) (LED Green)
• LCD A+: Netduino 3.3v (LED anode)
• LCD R-: Netduino D9 (PWM) (LED Red)
• LCD GND: Netduino GND
• LCD VDD: Netduino 3.3v
• LCD SID: Netduino D11 (SPI MOSI)
• LCD SCLK: Netduino D13 (SPI CLK)
• LCD A0: Netduino D7 (Data / Command)
• LCD /RST: Netduino D4
• LCD /CS: Netduino D10 (SPI CS) or us Netduino D8 if D10 used for the SD card CS pin

Using the Netduino’s PWM pins is not a requirement: the B-, G- and R- LCD pins can just be connected to the Netduino’s GND pin instead, which results in a bright white backlight.

The C# driver

As always, reading the datasheet for the LCD module is a must before starting on the driver details which is part of the netduino helpers library as usual.

According to the datasheet, the Display Memory Map is divided into 8 pages of 128 bytes each, laid out like this:

There are 2 implications of this memory organization on the Netduino:

1. The page that needs to be updated must be selected prior to sending a block of 128 bytes over SPI. This requires switching the LCD A0 pin between Command and Data mode constantly, which is limited to ~8.1KHz on the Netduino.
2. In addition, because SPI.Write() only takes a byte[] or a ushort[] argument, it is necessary to copy the 128 bytes of the page to an intermediate buffer usable by SPI from the buffer actually storing the 128×64 image bitmap. It would be very useful to add relative buffer addressing capability to SPI.Write() in a future version of the .Net MF to avoid shuffling data around like this.

As it turned out, the display frames still get refreshed quickly.

Sex, Lies and Datasheets

In practice, the Display Memory Map pages are not organized as the datasheet describes. Instead, this is how the pages are actually organized:

• Line zero is in the middle of the display, where page zero starts
• The image wraps at the bottom of page 3 and continues displaying from the top in page 4

Re-using the Netduino SSD1306 driver code

Controlling the backlight

In order to manage the RGB backlight easily, a new RGBLed class was also added to the netduino helpers library. It can be configured to work with RGB LEDs that have a common anode or common cathode configuration as indicated in the constructor of the RGBLed class. To use it, simply call SetColor() with a hex RGB value and an optional delay expressed in milliseconds before the function returns. The class also defines 12 handy common color constants, which is particularly useful in ‘Nyan Cat Animation’ scenarios

Conclusion

The Adafruit ST7565 is a beautiful, crisp, graphic display with pixels large enough to be seen without a magnifying glass (I’m looking at you, SSD1306…) and small enough to display images or multiple lines of text. The built-in RGB LED backlight makes for an effective method of communicating application status conditions at a glance and from a good distance, without having to read text. The screen appears to be made out of thin glass and is fragile, so be sure to handle the display with care: I inadvertently put a small dent in mine while soldering the connector and did not notice it until I turned the display on. My only wish is for the breakout board to support the common 0.1″ header pitch. Finally, because it only takes ~1.1KB to manage the display buffer, it is very usable for Netduino Plus applications without jumping through hoops.

Awesome! Buckle up, you’re in for a wild ride

The first step of your journey starts with gathering a few parts, which you can find listed in this spreadsheet along with their current retail price and links to the suppliers. In a nutshell, you’ll need about $95 to get all the required parts.

In an effort to keep the number of suppliers down to a minimum for your convenience, most of the parts for the PIX-6T4 prototype come from Sparkfun Electronics.

However, there are many alternative suppliers out there and with some research in Octopart, you will be able to reduce the cost of building this prototype.

Next time, we’ll cover the first step of the build, laying out the IC sockets, the analog joysticks, and some headers on the prototyping board, just like this:

Cheers,

-Fabien.