Weekly Devlog #3

Even a toaster can run minecraft

This weeks primary focus was software and turning 2 blank display screens into actually functional and usable keypads.
To start i need to define the limitations, for one in the final version of this project there will be 6 240x240 displays, each display having 57,600 pixels, which amounts to around about 1.105 Mib, for reference the Arduino Uno has 32Kb of flash. So i definitely cant just send raw c files for the pixels and simply load then through the Arduino, But why don’t i just load the c files onto a SD card and simply just have the Arduino stream the pixels from the SD card to the display, well i can but who wants to deal with the hassle of loading a SD card and putting it back into whatever contraption i come up with for a case, One of the main pillars of this project was to make it as easy as possible to customize what you want the hackpad to do and i find it to risky to assume anyone can find the SD card and load it properly without problem, i for one cant stand SD cards especially the breakout board readers.

So here’s where i reveal the big solution, the world changing revolutionary problem solving out of this world solution:

Im gonna stream the data through serial.

Essentially the Arduino (or whatever micro controller i use) will simply be a receiver and the host computer will be a sender. Now this introduces some limitations for example you can only send data so fast especially when your wire is bad, additionally im not sure what type of strain this will put on the hosts computer, while im also not sure how im gonna handle multiple events, but indue time i will flush out these problems and implement something that will surely make sense.

This Log is way shorter than my last and doesn’t really offer any insight or helpful information so i apologize but if you haven’t read my last one i attempted to instruct how to build the prototype displays i think its very informative and also maybe you can steal this project and actually make it good. I promise next week i wont disappoint :)

Im late on this one because the displays refused to print images so it took me a day to get the image 😔
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