Hackable Badge: Custom display graphics

VonSzarvas

This discussion was created from comments split from: My Hackable Badge.

DaveJenson

I'm trying to display my own graphics on the Hackable Badge. So I read that a separate program was used to design the full screen graphics. Is that program available? I can work it out eventually but that's a lot of bits!

Dave

Andy Lindsay (Parallax)

I'm not sure of the details on that separate program, but here is an FYI if you are programming it in C. The badgetools library has some functions that allow you to create and display graphics without additional software. If you want to try an example, download and unzip 20000-Badge-Propeller-C-Examples-Library-150918. In the unzipped folder, the example program is "...01 Display/11 Shapes to Display.side".

VonSzarvas

Hi Dave,

For a quick test during development I used: LCD Assistant to create the bytes.

It was a while ago, but I seem to recall the output was slightly different to the spin DAT format, and I used a spreadsheet to paste in the data and convert to a spin friendly format. This is likely what the SPIN sample code is using for image data.

The propeller could probably handle a simplified bmp format directly too. Not sure if anyone has written a decoder-- maybe that is what Andy's suggested C code is doing.

Couple options anyway. Let us know how you get on. I think a step-by-step guide on this process would be really handy.

Michael.

meiguoren

Hi, I figured out how to do this on my "guest" badge finally recently--I used the propeller as the testing code and pasted my hex in there. Kind of a barebones "how to" but should get folks going if they're new to this (like me). This will give you a monochrome picture to put on the badge, if this isn't clear ask questions and I'll try and make this more understandable.

Find a picture you want to use, open it with paint (assuming you're using windows- sorry) go to resize your picture, use pixels, resize, your screen is 128 by 64, so 64 is effectively your limit size, you can force it but your image will be distorted. Save as a BMP.
Open LCD assistant to open (leave all the defaults) the BMP ensure the size is 128 wide by 64 height. What I noticed was that it was changing the height and width to whatever I changed to using paint, if you try and upload that it will distort your image. Go to file, save output, and then open that in a text editor; I'm using notepad++.
Take the hex out of that file, just the hex, and copy and paste it as needed.

http://en.radzio.dxp.pl/bitmap_converter/

Publison

meiguoren wrote: »

Hi, I figured out how to do this on my "guest" badge finally recently--I used the propeller as the testing code and pasted my hex in there. Kind of a barebones "how to" but should get folks going if they're new to this (like me). This will give you a monochrome picture to put on the badge, if this isn't clear ask questions and I'll try and make this more understandable.

Find a picture you want to use, open it with paint (assuming you're using windows- sorry) go to resize your picture, use pixels, resize, your screen is 128 by 64, so 64 is effectively your limit size, you can force it but your image will be distorted. Save as a BMP.
Open LCD assistant to open (leave all the defaults) the BMP ensure the size is 128 wide by 64 height. What I noticed was that it was changing the height and width to whatever I changed to using paint, if you try and upload that it will distort your image. Go to file, save output, and then open that in a text editor; I'm using notepad++.
Take the hex out of that file, just the hex, and copy and paste it as needed.

http://en.radzio.dxp.pl/bitmap_converter/

Welcome to the forum!

Thanks for the tip!