Hey everyone,
Bill's recent electronics projects managed to rekindle my interest in
it as well. So, I decided on a mildly ambitious project, a Tetris
clone.
Tonight I (mostly) completed the first, and probably most tedious,
bit of this project - the display. It is a 10x21 array of LEDs, made
up of six 5x7 LED blocks.
Now you can all see how bad my soldering skills are. This is the
kind of thing that really should have been wire-wrapped.
Fortunately, I only had to go back and correct three spots where I
had soldered something to the wrong pin. Unfortunately, I haven't
tested each LED individually, so there may be some more errors that I
haven't discovered.
The only thing left for this part of the project is a connector. I'm
probably going to use a 40-pin IDE style connector, mainly because
ready-made cables are very easy to find. With the display not
permanently connected I'll also be able to use it in other projects,
which is a big plus as it was very tedious to put together.
The processor that I'll be using is an ATMega16 microcontroller and
I'm going to try using a NES controller as the input device. I
haven't figured out too many of the details yet.
Assuming that I don't give up on this I'll keep everyone updated as I
finish more pieces of it.
-- Dave Kimmel
crisco_kid (AT) shaw (DOT) ca
GEEKS:

Aug 31, 2005, at 4:35 AM, Bill Bradford wrote:

I immediately thought of this:

Same type of LED matrix with an AVR, as a "game kit".

Neat! I'm trying to do something very similar, but with more LEDs.

>The processor that I'll be using is an ATMega16 microcontroller and
>I'm going to try using a NES controller as the input device. I
>haven't figured out too many of the details yet.
>
I'm going to be putting all the pin headers on my AVR Butterfly
this weekend - it's based around at ATMega169.

When I got into the AVR processors, I just bought an STK500 and a
couple of ATMega16s. I'd already gone along the Basic Stamp -Pic
-PIC route, so I was already used to "bare" microcontrollers by
this point.

Just realized that in a month, I've gone from not knowing how to
solder
at all, to having a nice temperature-controlled Weller iron (yay ebay)
and being able to do stuff that I wouldnt have *touched* a month ago.

My first-ever soldering attempt looks horrible now:

I look at it and *CRINGE* compared to what I did, say, last night
on the
LCD kit.

Wow, you have improved! I'm quite impressed! I've been doing this
on and off as a hobby for years and my soldering skills STILL aren't
that good.
-- Dave Kimmel
crisco_kid (AT) shaw (DOT) ca

GEEKS:

Aug 30, 2005, at 10:30 PM, Dave Kimmel wrote:

Assuming that I don't give up on this I'll keep everyone updated as I
finish more pieces of it.

Well, I haven't given up yet, so here's the latest bit of progress.

I figured out how to handle row selection without using a ton of
output pins on the controller. I've also hacked up a little program
on the controller to run the row selection logic so that I could do
some testing.

the left there is an STK500, hooked up to the breadboard so that I
don't have to move the processor around every time I want to
reprogram it. the breadboard, starting at the bottom there is an
ATMega16, above that the row selection logic, and above that some
ULN2003 high-current drivers.

The row selection logic deserves a schematic diagram, but I usually
do those after I have a working prototype, so I don't have one yet.
In a nutshell, I used two AND gates (the chip on the right of the
middle row) to tie three 4017 divide-by-10 counters (the remaining
three chips on the middle row) together and form a divide-by-21
counter with decoded outputs. The CPU drives this with two output
pins, clock and reset. The outputs of the counter are hooked to the
ULN2003 drivers, which are then hooked to the rows of the display.
Five columns of the display are hooked directly to the positive
supply, through 330 ohm resistors. It's not impressive, but it
proves that I'm on the right track.

Bill, if you decide to get serious about programming AVRs, I highly
recommend checking out the WinAVR package. It's the GNU toolchain,
plus a bunch of utilities, all in an easy to install package. As the
name implies, it's for Windows, but all of the important tools can be
built for S X quite easily. The Procyon AVRLib is neat too, it
gives you a bunch of useful routines for use in your AVR programs.
-- Dave Kimmel
crisco_kid (AT) shaw (DOT) ca

GEEKS: