Display-o-Tron from pimoroni can i use it with the Activity board

dmkmedia

i have recentley bought an LCD screen called the Display-O-Tron from pimoroni.
http://shop.pimoroni.com/products/displayotron-3000

now i know it uses I2C and SPI plus the GPIO for the joystick.

could this be interface with the activity board as i did buy it for a project what started on the raspberry pi but now moved to the activity board

Heater.

I'm very sure it can. This is an odd place to be asking the question though.

Courtney Jacobs

Agreed. Moved to the more appropriate P1 forum.

dmkmedia

Courtney Jacobs wrote: »

Agreed. Moved to the more appropriate P1 forum.

sorry guys my first time on here and i need to feel my way around...
so how would i start with it i am a newbie with the propeller board and especially with SPIN ... my background is C, C++ Python
i am just on a learning curve with spin at the moment to see if i can get my head around it

Heater.

dmkmedia,

If you are proficient in C, C++, Python etc you should be able to get the hang of Spin in a day. The Propeller manual has everything you need to know. Except...there are tons of ready made objects to use in your Spin program in OBEX. I'm sure you will find objects in there to handle all the I2C and SPI stuff. GPIO is just a case of DIRA, INA and OUTA.

Duane Degn

Heater. wrote: »

If you are proficient in C, C++, Python etc you should be able to get the hang of Spin in a day.

I concur.

I had used C prior to using the Propeller and I was initially annoyed to have to learn Spin. But Spin is practically C without the brackets and semicolons.

Whenever I use C these days it feels very cumbersome. IMO the "repeat" command was a genius. If you want something to repeat four times, you just need the command "repeat 4".

There are a couple of things to watch out for.

Greater than or equal to is "=>" and less than or equal to is "=<". If the equal sign is on the right it acts as an assignment operator (which apparently has its uses but I've never used either ">=" or "<=" in any of my Spin programs).

Another thing to watch out for is to only use long sized variables when doing signed math. I also only use bit shifting operations and bit rotation operations on longs.

In general use bytes for characters.

I have some resources for learning Spin in post #3 of my index (link in my signature). I learned Spin from the Propeller Manual version 1.0. The links I used to this older version of the manual kept breaking so I added the pdf to my Dropbox and the present link points to this copy.

I use C on the Propeller ever so often but IMO, it's just not as fun as Spin. I'm sure I'm horribly biased in this regard but I have a hard time finding the low level code in may of the C functions. With Spin it's relatively easy to find lower level code since each method call includes the object name containing the code.

Duane Degn

I'm sure the Display-o-Tron could be used with the Propeller but I don't know what sort of driver it would need.

I'm presently working on cleaning up the code for these $5 OLED displays.

http://imall.iteadstudio.com/im130625003.html

Here's a video showing a bouncing Propeller beanie.

The beanie bitmap resides on the SD card and is read from the card and placed in the screen buffer each time its position changes. I use two screen buffers in order to keep a background image stored but keeping a buffer for bitmaps was using more memory than I had available in this project. I was pleased to see the Propeller could read the bitmap in fast enough for this animation.

At 0:49 in the video you can see a block of the screen inverted. It's not easy to see in the video but the text in the block is inverted along with the background.

I mention this little display for several reasons. One for $5 I think it's a great deal and two, I plan to use this display with the FONA (which I know you're interested in).

The current version of the code requires five (IIRC) control pins. The screen should be able to be controlled with two control pins (I2C mode) I'm plan on attempting to change the SPI code to I2C code soon.

The SPI version with SD card support is located here:

https://github.com/ddegn/OledWithSd

The Display-o-Tron will certainly work with the Propeller but you might need to write your own driver.

Steph Lindsay

dmkmedia wrote: »

sorry guys my first time on here and i need to feel my way around...
so how would i start with it i am a newbie with the propeller board and especially with SPIN ... my background is C, C++ Python
i am just on a learning curve with spin at the moment to see if i can get my head around it

Welcome! Feel free to take a look at learn.parallax.com. There are beginner-level tutorials for using C with the Propeller Activity Board, and Spin Propeller Board of Education (which is very similar to the Activity Board but has a different A/D, + VGA and a mic)

http://learn.parallax.com/propeller-c-tutorials

http://learn.parallax.com/propeller-spin-tutorials

They are written by the same author, so it might be relatively easy to compare similar activities in the two languages.

dmkmedia

thanks guys i will check em all out i'm having a break this weekend my head and eyes have had enough over last week or so ive been cramming really bad trying to get this project up and running. ive been working on my own for 15 hours a day over the last couple of weeks i started with a raspberry pi and moved to Xino RF then over to the activity board. it seems to have everything i need without the use of extra tech apart for the GSM what i already had FONA and thats on the way thanks to Duane Degn so here goes nothing...