Messages

31

TinyTV & Tiny Video Player / Re: What makes some videos restart when changing channels and others not?

« on: June 27, 2023, 11:26:12 AM »

Thanks for your support! The current behavior is supposed to be that all videos work that way. Starting from the beginning could be a fallback when there's something unexpected(to the firmware) in the video file. If some of these files are shorter/smaller and something you can share, could you try uploading some to some file sharing service? We can see if we get the same results here.

Thanks,
Ben

32

TinyTV & Tiny Video Player / Re: TinyTV2 doesn't show up as an external drive

« on: June 22, 2023, 03:55:37 PM »

Sounds like it may be powered down all the way when you're testing this- have you tried plugging it into the computer while the TV is on and playing videos? Otherwise it sounds like you've tested thoroughly and the TV may have been damaged or was already defective in some way, send us an email at info@tinycircuits.com referencing this thread if it's still not working please.

I did just test on an M2 with 13.4 since this type of thing can break/unbreak version to version, the first time it's plugged in the Mass Storage screen appears for about a second- macOS shows an "allow USB device" type prompt, then the TinyTV needs to be unplugged/replugged. After that it seems to work normally.

Thanks,
Ben

33

TinyTV & Tiny Video Player / Re: Converter app questions

« on: June 21, 2023, 11:53:00 AM »

Hi- yes, files will be pretty large for the low quality video due to the encoding. Modern high compression formats require a lot of processing power and memory, the TinyTV 2/Mini AVI format is just JPG frames and uncompressed audio which allows it to be decoded by the microcontroller inside the TVs.

I haven't really heard that feedback before. The app is a simple UI for FFmpeg, which is pretty widely used. Converting video requires a lot of processing power- it's CPU only and maybe only single threaded, so your processor might be at the highest frequency when running it. It's probably converting faster for you than other people with slower processors, but will definitely use a lot of processor time/create some heat. Not sure what we could do in this area, let me know if you have any thoughts.

Thanks,
Ben

34

TinyTV & Tiny Video Player / Re: TinyTV2 doesn't show up as an external drive

« on: June 21, 2023, 11:21:06 AM »

Sorry about the problem(and requiring the update, I know that's annoying). Trying to narrow it down, does the TV screen switch away from the video and show a 'USB storage mode' screen?

Is this on an Apple Silicon processor? We had some additional issues with those(each USB device needs to be given permission) but I think those have been resolved on the macOS side.

35

Thumby / Re: Scratch registers for Thumby settings

« on: December 27, 2022, 05:54:11 PM »

Hi- thanks for posting over here, unfortunately I haven't been able to directly engage on the Discord channel due to time constraints. I agree this is a pretty good/public/searchable spot for this.

Glad the WDT register usage could be understood! I haven't reviewed everything but the changes all look like they're going in the right direction, we're long past due for a cleanup.. We're a little slow/conservative on changes to avoid breaking things obviously, but I don't see anything I'm too concerned about. I'll check with Jason when he's back in the office next week.

Thanks,
Ben

36

Thumby / Re: Invader Test

« on: October 21, 2021, 01:27:42 PM »

Best picture my phone could manage, which is probably the only way to get a good sense of how it looks!

37

Thumby / Re: Font size

« on: October 21, 2021, 01:11:32 PM »

@acedent- I thought that would be a quick answer! I've been playing around with a bunch of stuff in MicroPython for the last day or two, and I think the answer is that blits with the built in FrameBuffer object are just a bit slow. It's extremely general purpose and can handle tons of use cases outside of our simple 1bpp need. The arduboy2 font section looks like a very reasonable C/C++ implementation for 1bpp, I've written(adapted?) similar stuff for TinyScreen etc. After a while, I was able to do something similar in a MicroPython Viper code block, and it actually runs faster than the built in stuff for this very specific need.. I'll see if I can get something far enough along for other people to take a look at.

38

Thumby / Re: Invader Test

« on: October 18, 2021, 12:53:58 PM »

Very cool to see that you're able to work on this with the emulator!  I tested it on hardware quickly and it seems to work as intended, keep us updated if you do any more before you have hardware!

39

Thumby / Re: Font size

« on: October 15, 2021, 07:16:43 PM »

Hi- the answer for 'eventually' is definitely. We'd like 5x7 default, with maybe some smaller options. Right now we're testing out implementation in pure MicroPython, but it's pretty slow and we'll probably need to implement it within the firmware, so that will delay initial availability of it for testing etc- if anyone has input on that, let us know!

Thanks,
ben

40

Thumby / Re: Thumby / RPi RP2040 specs

« on: October 07, 2021, 12:58:37 PM »

Hi Kieron,

With how we plan to ship Thumby, the MicroPython interpreter will eat plenty of RAM as well as possibly some minimal assets leftover in memory from the main menu, however the menu essentially runs and then completely exits to the game(power off/soft reset to get back to the menu, for now).  I don't currently have a number for what's used- I've read things like 16-32KB for the interpreter. Let me know if you need a better answer.

I'll admit that during development of our little game examples, we haven't worried about memory, it's a lot more than we're used to!

Thanks,
Ben

41

Thumby / Re: 'Mazogs' game scaled for Thumby Screen

« on: October 04, 2021, 07:08:17 PM »

Very cool! If you run it at 72x40 on your Arduboy, it will be pretty close to what you'd see on a Thumby, except about 25% larger pixels still! Keep us updated- not sure if the scaling is a mockup or functional, maybe we could test the code here?

Thanks,
Ben

42

Thumby / Re: Thumby / RPi RP2040 specs

« on: October 04, 2021, 06:58:51 PM »

Hi- the 2MB flash is a QSPI flash chip, the same one as used on the Raspberry Pi Pico. By default we plan to have the standard Pi Pico MicroPython interpreter loaded, which I believe is about half a MB, leaving about 1-1.5MB available.

There's 264KB RAM, no crpyto acceleration hardware that I'm aware of. Full specs at:

https://datasheets.raspberrypi.org/rp2040/rp2040-datasheet.pdf

Thanks for the interest!
Ben

43

Thumby / Re: Thumby Display Controller, Arduino Examples

« on: October 04, 2021, 06:50:55 PM »

Meant to respond last week, sorry- yep, lib/thumby.py will get you most of what you need until we have things documented. Thumby works fine in the Arduino IDE equivalent to the Raspberry Pi Pico, so it should be pretty easy to adapt the Arduboy library functionality, aside from the tough part of adapting games to the lower resolution.

Thanks,
Ben

44

Wirelings / Re: imu 9 dof wireling sampling rate

« on: January 20, 2021, 03:13:58 PM »

Hi Phil, thanks for using our products. Right, RTIMU is pretty old, but works pretty well. I haven't found anything more appropriate.

The software can get a lot more complex when reading multiple IMUs at once and recording, so there are a lot of potential causes. Have you timed any particular sections of code to determine what's slow? It could be some 'simple' stuff like I2C clock, non-optimized SD card writes, etc.

I believe the Wireling library has a delay in it that is not totally necessary, and could cause a significant slowdown in this type of application.

With the amount of math RTIMU does, I believe it can run the algorithm at around 250Hz with the default settings on TinyZero. So I think 50Hz or better is achievable for four IMUs as long as the SD writing is optimized. This assumes that the fusion algorithm needs to run on the microcontroller.

Thanks,
Ben

45

General Discussion / Re: ZOE GPS proto board / ZOE setup with examples

« on: December 18, 2020, 06:04:46 PM »

Thanks for the feedback, really appreciate it. Based on this and some review here, I think we will try to make this a 20x20mm TinyShield compatible with all processor boards, and use the ZOE-M8Q with UART as well as I2C if I can route it. The origins of the TinyScreen+ format board were a pretty specific use case. I'll update here, we'll build a few extra prototypes.