The Gameduino 3X shield that adds a bright touchscreen, an embedded GPU, headphone jack, accelerometer and microSD slot to your Arduino - or anything else with an SPI interface. Everything you need to create compelling games -- right in your hand.
- video output is in 24-bit color
- Gameduino 3X 4.3" is 480x272
- Gameduino 3X 7" is 800x480
- Gameduino 3X Dazzler is 1280x720
- OpenGL-style command set
- Up to 2000 sprites, any size
- 1 Mbyte of video RAM
- smooth sprite rotate and zoom with bilinear filtering
- smooth circle and line drawing in hardware - 16x antialiased
- JPEG and PNG loading in hardware
- built-in rendering of gradients, text, dials and buttons
Sound output is via an amplified headphone jack. The system supports a selection of built-in samples and instruments, and can also play samples from video memory, at up to 48KHz.
The BT815 can handle media in several formats directly. These save CPU memory, and mean simpler code on the CPU.
- decodes JPEG and PNG images directly. No libraries required
- for lossless image loading, decompresses (zlib INFLATE) directly
- audio samples can be 8-bit linear, ulaw or ADPCM
Built into the GPU's ROM are:
- high-quality fonts in 6 sizes
- samples of 8 musical instruments, playable by MIDI note
- samples of 10 percussion sounds
and of course you can load your own fonts and audio samples into the on-board 1 megabyte RAM.
Hardware
Gameduino 3 is much like the first Gameduino, an SPI peripheral. The sdcard is also on SPI. Touch and audio functions are handled by the FT810, so take no extra pins. The full pinout (Arduino shield pin numbers) is
| GND |
pwr |
Signal ground |
| 5V |
pwr |
Main supply: 5-7V |
| 11 |
in |
SPI MOSI |
| 12 |
out |
SPI MISO |
| 13 |
in |
SPI SCK |
| 8 |
in |
GPU SEL |
| 9 |
in |
SD SEL |
| 2 |
out |
INTERRUPT |
For power, the shield needs 5-7v at 200ma on the 5V input; it has on-board regulation.
It is a 3.3v device, but the inputs go through a level-shifter so are also 5v tolerant. The range of the analog outputs is 0-3.3v.
Gameduino 3 is open source hardware and software, released under BSD license. The PCB schematics and layout are here.
