Archive for the ‘General’ Category

Freetronics DMD – Games

Saturday, February 4th, 2012

I had a little while free and so ported a bunch of games I wrote for the Peggy2 to work with a pair of DMD’s
In doing so the games now run at 32×32 and are controlled by a Wii nunchuck.
The games are snake, pong, breakout and race.
The Arduino code is available at DMD_games.zip
The two screens are daisy-chained but as the cable connecting them is quite short the top one is upside-down.
To get this working the modified DMD library is setup to handle rows of displays where odd-numbered rows are upside down.
See this diagram for how it is laid out (for 2×2 case)

Playing is fairly straight-forward.  Only thing to remember is that the ‘z-button’ on the nunchuck is used to select and the ‘c-button’ is used to exit back to the menu

Have a look at the video below to see them in action.

Freetronics DMD – updated library

Saturday, February 4th, 2012

I recently got two Dot Matrix Displays from Freetronics -
They are 32×16 LED panels that can be daisychained via SPI.
It came with a quick library which worked okay but could do with a few enhancements ;)
My modified library supports multiple displays (tested with 2×1 and 1×2 layout – but should work with other layouts)
It also supports multiple fonts, marquee text, scrolling the display around and grayscale (grayscale sort of works – but not well :( )
I have updated the examples included in the original library to use these new functions.

The library can be downloaded from github.com/cjd/DMD
See freetronics forum for my DMD library

G’day

Sunday, March 15th, 2009

I’ve had this blog sitting here blank for a fair while now and so I figured it is about time I did something with it.

I work in Sun as a backline OS engineer and have a major interest in Linux along with Solaris.

I’ve recently got into electronics and am in the progress of making a Arduino controlled lighting box and also am designing my own little robot.

In this blog I’ll attempt to document the lighting box and whatever else I get around to making.

I also have a habit of writing lots of little scripts/fixes so I’ll post them here as well anything else that comes to mind

Here’s hoping I actually remember to do any of this :-)