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Logic Gate Board Game 03: Adventures in MPLab -- Episode 292

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element14's The Ben Heck Show

Join the Ben Heck team every week for amazing hacks! Watch them build and mod community-inspired projects using electronics!

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Logic Gate Board Game
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After deciding to use an LCD screen for the Logic Gate Board Game, Ben gets to work on programming the Pic32mz series microcontroller in MPLab X IDE. Using the programming software and Direct Memory Access (DMA) transfers, Ben learns how to display everything from TrueType Font (ttf) text to images and photo’s on the screen. After some soldering, Ben gets stuck in and has to make a trade-off due to the amount of available RAM on the microcontroller with processes called ‘double buffering’ to make sure that as little RAM is used as possible. As Ben says, programming is 10% coding, 90% copy/paste! Do you have any experience driving LCD screens? Or want to chime in on the Logic Gate Board game build?

 

Disclaimer

  • Just a heads up, this version of Harmony does support PNGs. There is a Graphics Composer Asset Manager tab that allows you to convert source images of any format (GIF, TIFF, TGA, BMP, etc) to JPEG, PNG or RAW (basic bitmap). You have mentioned using bitmap would be ideal for speed, that is true. The Graphics Composer Asset Manager does support RLE compression for RAW format. You should get decent flash space savings using that also. The runtime PNG decoder is a big memory hog. It works best for smaller images, unless you have setup a large heap size.

  • Great episode.

     

    It reminds me a lot of the programming I did in the 1980's where we put symbology and text on a 800 by 800 bit FLIR screen for a helicopter application.

     

    We had to define all of the symbols as bit maps and build our own text library using 16 by 16 bit maps.

    Your DMA approach is similar to how we mapped memory into the display pixels.

    We used a simple video mixer to include the FLIR image behind our text and symbols to provide the pilot with a full zero visibility capability with radar provided attitude information.

     

    Lots of fun memories from that very successful project.  Oh by the way, I did everything with a pair of 8085 Intel processors running about 4 MHz.

     

    DAB