6 replies to this topic

[Terry Massey]

Hello Everyone.

Today I would like to share some work that community members Omar(OZ) and I have been working on for the past month. This project started out to develop a set of lean clean drivers to use the 4DSystems Display Shields.Omar did a great job removing unnecessary enums for colors that were in our first few revisions. He worked with engineers at 4D Systems to produce the most efficient code. This method reduces the amount of flash space with a simple bitof math returning a color. We have a nice set of demos included in the source.Quiche31’s Commands enum was also a huge contribution. We also wrote a nice joystick class that provides events when the joystick is moved. Omar and I are extremely excited to share this code with the community! We have many more contributions planned for the future.

We will keep this project on CodePlex up to date with the bleedingedge code. Each manufacturer and board or sets of boards will be a separateproject. The code will be kept up to date and current at http://theshieldstore.codeplex.com.Also if you have any code or project you would like to share or think will help users of the Netduino, Netduino MinI or Netduino Plus let us know by emailing MyProject@theshieldstore.com. Wewill be happy to include your code. We always suggest posting it here first.

If you want the latest tested and stable version for any given Shield you can check out http://www.theshieldstore.com. We will announce in this forum when we have a new project with drivers ready.

To view the demo and videos for the 4D Systems Shields,please visit http://www.theshield...-redefined.aspxfor the full article and videos.

Thanks,
Terry Massey and Omar(OZ)

[Chris Walker]

Cool Terry. Displays! Nice. BTW, thanks for e-mailing me before you posted this. We try to keep unsolicited advertising off the forums--but sharing code contributions on your commercial website is certainly fine. We love seeing makers build businesses around Netduino and open source hardware...and hope we can help at least a few community members quit their days jobs and create/sell accessories full-time. Chris

[Terry Massey]

Cool Terry. Displays! Nice.

BTW, thanks for e-mailing me before you posted this. We try to keep unsolicited advertising off the forums--but sharing code contributions on your commercial website is certainly fine. We love seeing makers build businesses around Netduino and open source hardware...and hope we can help at least a few community members quit their days jobs and create/sell accessories full-time.

Chris

Thank you Chris for the feedback. and the kudos.

Well we have worked pretty hard the past month on these drivers. Tweaking them while we worked on the demos making them as fast and lean as possible even using logic probes to monitor the bits as they passed to each pin. However this is 4D Systems Display Shields, and we have some products we are getting ready to produce. We want to get some feedback on which ones you like the most. So I added a Poll to this Thread so not to clutter the forums. We are asking in the Poll which of our designs you would be likely to want First. I also turned on multiple selection as you may want more than one. We will take these results along with other feed back to determine which will be produced and in what order. Bear in mind there are other designed we are working on but are not quite ready for production. We will conduct another poll but likely this time on our site. New site glitch and our poll isn't showing up yet. Thanks in advance for all who participate in the Poll. as always if you have an idea let us know.. Who knows your idea might be the next one we produce.

[hanzibal]

Really nice Terry, the displays from 4D Systems are really somthing and surpricingly affordable. Kudos? What do I need to do to get those, me want

[Terry Massey]

This just stinks.... I put a poll up and were about dead even.. I will say that the project going to production next has been chosen and final prototypes are being built and tested. HOwever go ahead a vote for your your favorite or let us know what you would like to see. be it a kit or a shield.

[Fred]

I found that when communicating with the 4D display (for my GPS puzzle box project) that I needed a pause after some commands. I found that in someone else's code on here, and it was definitely needed. I notice your code doesn't have any. I was hoping that you'd covered more of the stuff I hadn't got round to - e.g. uploading images/video to the display's uSD card and using them from there, sound, etc. The 4D range of displays are capable of so much more that any of us have made use of yet.

[adamCoding]

Great job Terry, I was messing around with 4D serial displays awhile ago for quick prototyping. They got the job done, I found them to be a bit buggy. Driver code I wrote can be found here