Arduino's Game of Life

[Nick]

Hi

i know lot's of the people here are interested in more than only calculator development. So i decided to put a little more arduino stuff in here.
i recently bought a color screen for my arduino, the MI0283QT-2 from watterott.com.

it's a wonderful screen, resolution 320*240 with touch (resistive). and it runs quite smooth with the arduino.
now there's an example of conway's game of life, which you can see in the video.

i just wanted to show this, because it's lovely and i hope you like it...

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mI_VwaLD6f8" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mI_VwaLD6f8</a>

btw, i did not make it myself, it's an example program from the manufacturer

[MGOS]

Wow, that's so awesome. And the touch-lcd shield looks quite good as well (for the super cheap price it is sold). Does it run at full speed or is it slowed down?

[Nick]

yes, it's running at full speed.. that's why i said 'quite smooth'. it's not really fast indeed, but fast enough to do some graphing, text, images etc, but not for gaming or equivalent speed-needing applications.

i don't really need the speed though, since i'm going to build my own logitech harmony 1000 (universal remote) with the screen, and for that it only needs to have the ability to display images and text at a reasonable speed, which it does
the arduino is only 16MHz, so don't expect it to be superspeed xp

[ben_g]

A calc is only 15 MHz (on full speed mode), and you can play reasonable games on it. An arduino also doesn't run the outdated z80, so it should be a bit faster than the calc. Aslo, I noticed the blocks fade away. Is this an effect, or is the screen just really blurry?

[Nick]

well, it's not the arduino itself that is slow, but the time it needs to send the commands is quite long.. if you would take a b/w screen 96*64 like the 83/84+ ones, it would be a little faster indeed, but here we have a full color 320*240 lcd, which is slightly more enhanced than the other screen

and the color is an effect. it depends on how long it is dead, and that gives it a nice effect (if you know it), but if you don't know it, it might indeed look like blur

[Nick]

another program: paint
as the name says, it's a very simple paint program that lets you draw on the screen using different pens/colors/sizes. does not feature a lot until noq, wince i can't check the color of pixels and i can't store them in an array (tooooo big for the arduino). if i can manage to store it somehow on the sd-card (like bmp format or something) that reads fast, then i can add effects, layers, fileters etc..

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHWH-YMrZZw" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHWH-YMrZZw</a>

[Jim Bauwens]

Very nice Nick

[Nick]

thanks jim