Gameduino HDMI board launched on crowdsupply

T

thomasp

Active member
After having pushed my 9 inch buydisplay RA8875 screens to the limit with my Teensys, I was excited to get an email this morning that the new HDMI FPGA based board from the Gameduino family has been launched on CrowdSupply:
Gameduino 3X Dazzler

Can't wait to get my hands on this as unavailability of fast GPU accelerated large (10''+) screens with Teensy / Arduino has been one of the main limiting factors for my projects.
 
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This shield seems like it has everything you'd want (except 3D and texturemapping), and the FPGA is pretty exciting. It will not ship for some time. Between now and then, there is some more silicon inside the 4.x series that might be of some use to you.

Teensy 4.x processors have a PXP (pixel pipeline) which is capable of scaling, rotation, and blending. The PXP has its own execution resources, so it doesn't impact CPU availability. It is rarely discussed on these forums, but its capabilities seem quite useful. It doesn't rise to the level of a GPU (won't draw primitives or do lighting.) I think a simple primitive-drawing engine running on the CPU (Bresenham lines, circles, polygons, filling with solid colors or textures) could combine very well with the PXP.
 
True, was hoping to see more information on the Teensy 4.0 PXP but in the end having an HDMI option with integrated GPU is just so convenient and with HDMI the choice of screen is endless. The RA8875 based displays are not bad but some of my projects require very low latency info updates on the screen on controller changes and the RA8875 is not that fast.
 
My takeaway from the 1060 manual was that the built-in PXP stuff wasn't actually useful unless you were directly driving the output on the LCD interface.
 
You can by it, but with an HDMI adapter that adds 5V.
Afterwards it's like for the rest of the arduino shilds, it doesn't necessarily work as we want.

It should be noted that the gameduino offers very impressive capacities for arduino.

But yes the gameduino 3X Dazzler has design flaws, and that's a shame.
 
I got one to test with some neat amoled displays I have here, as well as other small HDMI displays as it seems a world above tinkering with SPI oleds and wiring analog meters; I was looking forward to coding up some UI interfaces and eager to put this thing to use. Unlike the other shields etc that have been sketchy from time to time fresh out of the box, a quick look at the forum indicated that there were lots of people struggling to get answers for various code questions and basically getting it to work.

Hardware wise the HDMI connection is flawed and won't work as described; also the power inputs seem weak; maybe some big decoupling caps somewhere would help with stability as well as high efficiency switching converters rather than linear regulators. I never got demo code to work on the Uno R3 and the R3 eventually stopped working altogether and remains dead; it might be a USB cord issue as well, but with no feedback from the unit (power LED and heartbeat LED would be a good start) it's an increasingly frustrating 50$ guessing game.

Using an external power supply and a teensy 3.2 seemed like a good start, but by this point even the demo splash screen wouldn't show up on the random huge TV I got any response on.

Emailing anyone (Crowd Supply or the developer) gets no response but I noticed while desperately searching for any help at all that they have responded to Better Business Bureau complaints, so I filed one. The response was quick(er) and now 2-3 weeks later I can send the unit back to an apologetic Crowd Supply.

I develop products using the Arduino environment for a living, and finding such a disconnect between promise and reality with this dev has been uniquely disappointing and something I feel I don't need to support. Conceptually it's a game changer, and I look forward to it becoming more generally useful or for someone to come along with a more finished and better supported (or supported in any way at all) version. For now it seems to work for people in some narrow use cases but appears to be largely abandoned by the developer.
 
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