Recent Posts

11

TinyDuino Processors & TinyShields / SmallScreen Smart Watch Codec Problems

« Last post by villagetunic on April 14, 2024, 11:44:31 PM »

Farewell, everyone, I'm somewhat inexperienced with this type of programming, and I'm struggling to upload a sketch onto the watch in order to proceed. Drivers, updates, and device recognition have been the least difficult things thus far, but the integrated development environment (IDE) is giving me a headache, gorilla tag so I'm not sure what to do next. Here is a screenshot showing the faults. What am I not seeing? Does any library have an error? Nothing has worked since I went to github to grab the new library files.

Could you please lend me a hand? I'm very unprepared and I simply wanted to show myself that I could pull this off.

12

Thumby / Thumby Freezes / crashes when i use dpad up

« Last post by SpamToast on April 12, 2024, 12:27:47 PM »

Hey everyone, i did not find any Threads that describe my Issue so ill open one up.
I have a really weird problem with my Thumby. In ALL games and even the Menu my Thumby freezes as i press the Up button.
Not everytime, sometimes i can play a minute or two but definetaly to often... i can't even play Tennis till i lose even if i want to except if i do NOT use up arrow
It only happens using this specific Button. Did anyone ever had that?
I used the format function in the Web editor, i updated it, i even installed the firmware manually.
i dont know what to do and hope for help.

SpamToast

new Question: Is it possible to open the Shell of Thumby without breaking it? looks like its glued and would break. maybe somethin ist stuck inside and shorts the device as i press the up button?

13

Thumby / Re: Sprite issues

« Last post by jumlouhasa on April 08, 2024, 04:14:49 AM »

This is awesome!

14

Thumby / Re: Porting micropython thumby libraries to C?

« Last post by Jason on April 05, 2024, 10:00:30 AM »

I'm starting to look into how i want to make games for the thumby but I realized there's a lot of micropython only functionality like saves and sprites. (I'm addicted to C).

Could someone give me a few pointers and how to reimplement the micropython stuff in C? Here's some of the specific stuff I was trying to figure out:

Where in the micropython fork should I be looking for thumby specific stuff? there's a couple of branches and files, is it all just in rp2? Whats actually loaded on the thumby? there's probably something in the code editor repo i haven't found yet...

For hardware interaction I definitely need to figure out how to load littlefs or whatever filesystem abstraction micropython is using. Is there a specific place in the repo that deals with that? I might just try loading up a littlefs C library..

Also is there any other hardware interactions that C is missing besides the filesystem? I see a sprite system but maybe that's just a nice wrapper around loading sprites and writing them to the buffer.

(anyhow thanks for reading)

Hi,

We don't actually use a fork of MicroPython for the Thumby firmware, we use the vanilla/regular version from the website (1.19.1: https://micropython.org/download/RPI_PICO/). The version we have on our GitHub is mostly for the emulator and testing.

Although we don't build our own MicroPython, I am very familiar with how it works. If you want to use littlefs from C then you can use version that gets pulled in from MicroPython itself (lib/littlefs/lfs2.h). This isn't exactly simple though as you will have to reimplement the prog/sync/erase functions for the RP2040. The documentation on how to use littlefs is in this header: https://github.com/littlefs-project/littlefs/blob/master/lfs.h

There are a couple of different hardware interactions that would have to be implmented in C:

• Init and sending data to the display
• Buttons
• Sound

The sprite portion of the Thumby library just handles pulling data from a sprite and then copying it into the framebuffer at a location. It also does some simple animation type stuff.

15

Thumby / Porting micropython thumby libraries to C?

« Last post by casssoft on April 04, 2024, 11:40:06 AM »

I'm starting to look into how i want to make games for the thumby but I realized there's a lot of micropython only functionality like saves and sprites. (I'm addicted to C).

Could someone give me a few pointers and how to reimplement the micropython stuff in C? Here's some of the specific stuff I was trying to figure out:

Where in the micropython fork should I be looking for thumby specific stuff? there's a couple of branches and files, is it all just in rp2? Whats actually loaded on the thumby? there's probably something in the code editor repo i haven't found yet...

For hardware interaction I definitely need to figure out how to load littlefs or whatever filesystem abstraction micropython is using. Is there a specific place in the repo that deals with that? I might just try loading up a littlefs C library..

Also is there any other hardware interactions that C is missing besides the filesystem? I see a sprite system but maybe that's just a nice wrapper around loading sprites and writing them to the buffer.

(anyhow thanks for reading)

16

TinyTV & Tiny Video Player / Re: HiRes video converted to TinyTV has +60% file size

« Last post by Dominicus on April 01, 2024, 07:37:07 PM »

Thanks for sharing the technical details. After reading up on MJPEG all makes sense.

17

General Discussion / Drift in Read Voltage

« Last post by kmarxx on April 01, 2024, 06:55:42 PM »

I was using the TinyDuino to read in a voltage value (20 readings / sec) which fluctuated between ~2 - ~4 volts over about 12 hours. I noticed what appeared to be drift over the course of the 12 hour test and after some troubleshooting I realized that even when the voltage being read by the duino was constant (was using pin A5 to read voltage), the data that the duino would save to my SD was drifting... tried to replicate the issue with an Arduino Uno but it saved constant voltage values without drift?

Any thoughts on what could cause this? Is this a known problem with the TinyDuino platform?

Thanks!

18

TinyTV & Tiny Video Player / TinyTv + Akai APC

« Last post by Kalacolella on March 29, 2024, 10:55:25 PM »

Hey there! I was wondering if there’s a way for me to connect my TinyTv to a Akai APC mini controller?

19

TinyTV & Tiny Video Player / Unable to access TinyTV website and converter

« Last post by MarkNYC on March 29, 2024, 02:42:54 PM »

Hi,

For some reason, I'm unable to access the website in order to convert my files to play on the TV.

Is anyone having the same issue?  Is there another way to access the converter?

Thanks,
Mark

20

TinyTV & Tiny Video Player / Re: HiRes video converted to TinyTV has +60% file size

« Last post by Ben Rose on March 27, 2024, 05:22:41 PM »

Hi- yes, it's counterintuitive but the file size can increase due to the encoding used within the AVI file. TinyTV uses a very low power microcontroller so the AVI contains a MJPEG video stream and uncompressed audio which is all it can handle. The compression ratio is low compared to H264 that might be in a MP4 file, but that's how we're able to achieve the video playback on a device this size/cost.

Thanks,
Ben