I shall await anxiously while you prototype your way to a small fortune
Maybe my wires are crossed, but Martin has already done it. Click on the link at the bottom of his posts which takes you to his website, and he has the boards and it appears he can put a payment through on a card online. The product is there.
Maybe we propellerheads need to head over to the arduino forums and tell people about it?
Maybe my wires are crossed, but Martin has already done it. ...
Okay, I'm confused, too. I don't know enough about the Arduino to be able to tell if what Martin has on his website does what I'm asking about (simple output for Arduino VGA) or not. And in post #28, it appears that Martin is "thinking out loud" about what sort of modifications he'd have to do to his ASC to make this happen. Beats me. I need to be spoon fed answers or it becomes obvious pretty quickly how little I know about any of this stuff. After reading all these posts, I get the impression that many people have come close to doing this but nobody has followed through just yet.
From a marketing standpoint, it seems to me that the Arduino could act as a gateway drug to the Propeller. Give the Arduino crowd some shields that do some amazing things, and they'll start to wonder what this Propeller thing is all about and how to "hack" into it.
Has an SD card too. That opens up some more arduino possibilities.
I think this is a board for arduino add-ons. What I'm not sure about is whether it can talk to an arduino motherboard. I think it can though. What you would do is devote two propeller pins to talk to the arduino with Tx and Rx. The propeller pins that go to the header in the middle of the board would go to the VGA addon board. The other propeller pins that go to the arduino header would be set HiZ so they would be controlled by the arduino rather than the propeller.
The bit that I'm not sure about is the supply voltage. The arduino has its own regulators as does Martin's board. But you only need one regulator, so maybe the regulators need to be left off, or maybe if they are already soldered on the board, need to cut a link? Martin will chime in soon no doubt.
The Arduino Due can do VGA and upcoming versions of the Arduino-IDE (now beta) will support the 8-bitters and the Due under one hood... so the distance from a classic 8-bit Arduino to a Due is dramatically shorter than to a Propeller.
It might make more sense in the Arduino world to use a solution from its own "biotope".
I think we should ask ourselves here why we insist in using a Propeller for this task... in my eyes this will only make life more complicated for the Arduinorian next door.
Let us also not forget Rayman's new VGA Graphics Sheild to plug into a Propeller Platform. This propeller board could then communicate to an Arduino as previously discussed. I have one and it is fast! and also provides headphone, mouse and keyboard connections too.
...
I think we should ask ourselves here why we insist in using a Propeller for this task.......
I saw this Due-VGA thing when I was searching for an Arduino VGA solution, but from what little I see on the Arduino forum, there is yet no shield commercially available for this. Am I wrong about that?
I was also under the impression that the VGA processing looks like it uses up the entire Due, that the Arduino could process VGA and do little else besides that. Maybe I'm wrong about that, too?
I also vaguely remember reading something about the interrupts messing up the VGA periodically, but I don't even know what that means.
So from what I gather about this, you are saying you (or somebody) could make a shield from a Due to use with all other Arduinos? Is that the concept?
One of my many future projects is to make an Arduino shield for the Rover 5 chassis. They seem to be really common and a lot of them have four motors, each equiped with a quadrature encoder. Apparently the way to use a quadrature encoder on an Arduino is to catch the encoder pulse with an interrupt. The problem is, with four quadrature encoders, there's no time for the main program to run since it's overloaded with interrupts. I have yet to see an Arduino controlled Rover 5 using all four of the encoders.
I've already had one person/team use a QuickStart as a slave to their Arduino. The Arduino sent serial signals to the QuickStart and the QuickStart did all the heavy lifting of encoder monitoring and motor control. The Arduino was then free to monitor a few sensors and try to keep track of where the robot was.
I thought maybe instead of making an Arduino user wire up a QuickStart board, I could make some sort of encoder/PWM shield to make the whole process easier.
I saw these links when I was searching around, and I found this to be the standard experience:
...The chip is kept quite busy refreshing the screen ... ...which means there isn't a heap of spare processing time.... You could have the one do the lot, but the screen might have to go blank, or flicker, if it was doing a lengthy computation...
It seems that, at the very least, another Arduino would be needed to get any decent performance, so I began to wonder if a Propeller might make an attractive shield for this sort of thing. As of right now, it looks like an Arduino can't do it alone.
Using the Propeller to provide VGA output for the Arduino
The first try to do something like this was the Propellurino.
Use the Atmega as master and the p8x32a as vga/ntsc or pal output slave.
Both can communicate through i2c or a 8-bit bus.
Logic level conversion for i2c with a PCA9306D and for the 8-bit bus with a 74HC4050
It comes pre-programmed for that app. But with a PropPlug, it can be reprogrammed for any number of other apps.
-Phil
I was wondering about something already pre-fabbed for VGA, with which slobs like me could simply plug-n-chug. Also, it seems to me that a Propeller-propelled Arduino might allow Ardweenies the ability to operate without those wretched interrupts - maybe??? somehow? Frankly, I don't really find the Arduino as user-friendly as it's touted to be. And the shield "standards" seem to get stomped on all over all the time. I bet some Propeller-based shields could do quite well with the Arduino crowd.
Comments
Excellent news. I'm glad you brainiacs are approaching this dire gap in the Arduino market with a sense of swashbuckling adventure and cosmic duty.
I shall await anxiously while you prototype your way to a small fortune.
Kickstarter, maybe?
Maybe my wires are crossed, but Martin has already done it. Click on the link at the bottom of his posts which takes you to his website, and he has the boards and it appears he can put a payment through on a card online. The product is there.
Maybe we propellerheads need to head over to the arduino forums and tell people about it?
Okay, I'm confused, too. I don't know enough about the Arduino to be able to tell if what Martin has on his website does what I'm asking about (simple output for Arduino VGA) or not. And in post #28, it appears that Martin is "thinking out loud" about what sort of modifications he'd have to do to his ASC to make this happen. Beats me. I need to be spoon fed answers or it becomes obvious pretty quickly how little I know about any of this stuff. After reading all these posts, I get the impression that many people have come close to doing this but nobody has followed through just yet.
From a marketing standpoint, it seems to me that the Arduino could act as a gateway drug to the Propeller. Give the Arduino crowd some shields that do some amazing things, and they'll start to wonder what this Propeller thing is all about and how to "hack" into it.
Has an SD card too. That opens up some more arduino possibilities.
I think this is a board for arduino add-ons. What I'm not sure about is whether it can talk to an arduino motherboard. I think it can though. What you would do is devote two propeller pins to talk to the arduino with Tx and Rx. The propeller pins that go to the header in the middle of the board would go to the VGA addon board. The other propeller pins that go to the arduino header would be set HiZ so they would be controlled by the arduino rather than the propeller.
The bit that I'm not sure about is the supply voltage. The arduino has its own regulators as does Martin's board. But you only need one regulator, so maybe the regulators need to be left off, or maybe if they are already soldered on the board, need to cut a link? Martin will chime in soon no doubt.
http://forums.parallax.com/showthread.php/124288-Propeller-ASC-(Arduino-Shield-Compatible)?p=982552#post982552
http://blog.arduino.cc/2012/11/05/arduino-due-vga-signal-out/
http://arduino.cc/forum/index.php?topic=150517.0
The Arduino Due can do VGA and upcoming versions of the Arduino-IDE (now beta) will support the 8-bitters and the Due under one hood... so the distance from a classic 8-bit Arduino to a Due is dramatically shorter than to a Propeller.
It might make more sense in the Arduino world to use a solution from its own "biotope".
I think we should ask ourselves here why we insist in using a Propeller for this task... in my eyes this will only make life more complicated for the Arduinorian next door.
http://www.rayslogic.com/Propeller/Products/VgaGraphics/VgaGraphics.htm
Tim
I saw this Due-VGA thing when I was searching for an Arduino VGA solution, but from what little I see on the Arduino forum, there is yet no shield commercially available for this. Am I wrong about that?
I was also under the impression that the VGA processing looks like it uses up the entire Due, that the Arduino could process VGA and do little else besides that. Maybe I'm wrong about that, too?
I also vaguely remember reading something about the interrupts messing up the VGA periodically, but I don't even know what that means.
So from what I gather about this, you are saying you (or somebody) could make a shield from a Due to use with all other Arduinos? Is that the concept?
Andy
I've already had one person/team use a QuickStart as a slave to their Arduino. The Arduino sent serial signals to the QuickStart and the QuickStart did all the heavy lifting of encoder monitoring and motor control. The Arduino was then free to monitor a few sensors and try to keep track of where the robot was.
I thought maybe instead of making an Arduino user wire up a QuickStart board, I could make some sort of encoder/PWM shield to make the whole process easier.
Forum:
http://arduino.cc/forum/index.php?topic=102181.0
Website:
http://www.gammon.com.au/forum/?id=11608
Hi Bob,
I saw these links when I was searching around, and I found this to be the standard experience:
It seems that, at the very least, another Arduino would be needed to get any decent performance, so I began to wonder if a Propeller might make an attractive shield for this sort of thing. As of right now, it looks like an Arduino can't do it alone.
The first try to do something like this was the Propellurino.
Use the Atmega as master and the p8x32a as vga/ntsc or pal output slave.
Both can communicate through i2c or a 8-bit bus.
Logic level conversion for i2c with a PCA9306D and for the 8-bit bus with a 74HC4050
It comes pre-programmed for that app. But with a PropPlug, it can be reprogrammed for any number of other apps.
-Phil
I'm guessing - it no longer exists?
I was wondering about something already pre-fabbed for VGA, with which slobs like me could simply plug-n-chug. Also, it seems to me that a Propeller-propelled Arduino might allow Ardweenies the ability to operate without those wretched interrupts - maybe??? somehow? Frankly, I don't really find the Arduino as user-friendly as it's touted to be. And the shield "standards" seem to get stomped on all over all the time. I bet some Propeller-based shields could do quite well with the Arduino crowd.