Need help setting up Tiny Arcade as a video player

[Tommyph1208]

Hi guys!
So I am one of the original kickstarter backers of the Tiny Arcade, I never got around to installing other games on the machine than the 3 in-built ones and its been sitting around on my desk, mostly as a decorative item.
Now I wanna try making a tiny TV for a dollhouse for my daughter, and figured the arcade components would be perfect for this since I´m not using it anyway...
After having read around for a while I found the zip containing all of the released games and a video player folder and put those on to an SD card... I also found the TSV converter, installed that and converted a small video I downloaded from youtube and put it in the root of the SD card (are there limits to length/filesize/etc. here?).
I have come to the conclusion that all I would have needed to do was to plug that SD card into the machine with the default sketch that came loaded on it, and that would have been it...?
Sadly along the way of my reading and learning, I was at some point following a basics tutorial which instructs you to compile and upload the Arduino Blink example to the board, which I did making it obviously now useless...
I tried looking at the Tiny Video Player tutorial found here: https://tinycircuits.com/blogs/learn/tiny-video-player-tutorial-in-progress but it seems to be made for the Tiny Screen+ processor board so I cant use that right?
I´m also uncertain about the instructions I have seen several places about setting the board in "boot mode" by holding down the two buttons while turning the board on? Is this needed in order to upload sketched to the board? It dosn´t seem to do anything on my board (I still just have a black screen).

Can someone direct me to what arduino sketch I need to load to my board to be able to play back my video files on my Tiny Arcade, and wht the process for this is?

Thanks in advance
Tommy

[lennevia]

Hello Tommy,

The Tiny Arcade is actually modeled around the hardware of the TinyScreen+, so you should be able to upload the program from the TinyScreen+ Video Player tutorial to your Tiny Arcade just fine. This tutorial includes a program that lets the Tiny Arcade simply play the videos on the microSD card when powered on, without a menu.

If you want to get your Tiny Arcade back to having the menu for games and videos, follow this tutorial: https://tinycircuits.com/blogs/learn/171319495-tiny-arcade-menu-update Then you would be able to play the games with the menu choice, as well as have an option to play videos alongside the games on the SD card.

The length/file size of videos loaded onto the SD card are limited by the size of the microSD card you have.

You don't need to use boot mode each time you upload a program, only if the board seems unresponsive to programs or the port is not showing up when you go to program it.

Thanks for the renewed interest! We hope the addition to your daughter's dollhouse looks great!

-Laveréna

[Tommyph1208]

EDIT: Nevermind, I found the instructions w. the external boards manager link

Hi Laveréna, thank you for the reply
I think I'll attempt the Menu approach, to also have some games on the "TV"... I have a small challenge in that I can't seem to figure out how to get the tiny screen to show up as a target board in the Arduino IDE... The Blink example that I initially wrote to it was using the "Arduino pro or pro mini" setting... I tried looking in the boards manager, but can't find anything related to the Tinycircuits board (sorry, my aruino skills are pretty non existant, so its all pretty new to me).

[djb_rh]

EDIT: Nevermind, I found the instructions w. the external boards manager link

Hi Laveréna, thank you for the reply
I think I'll attempt the Menu approach, to also have some games on the "TV"... I have a small challenge in that I can't seem to figure out how to get the tiny screen to show up as a target board in the Arduino IDE... The Blink example that I initially wrote to it was using the "Arduino pro or pro mini" setting... I tried looking in the boards manager, but can't find anything related to the Tinycircuits board (sorry, my aruino skills are pretty non existant, so its all pretty new to me).

The tutorial you still need is this one:

https://tinycircuits.com/blogs/learn/158833543-tinyscreen-setup

It can be annoying to find somehow, but this is the one that shows you how to setup the Arduino IDE to find the boards you need it to find.  Note you need to install TWO boards *and* one Library.  I did it yesterday after much digging and got my TinyArcade playing a video off an SD card.

Note that for some reason, the define doesn't seem to work to set it in "arcade" mode.  I simply commented out the ifdef's specific to the arcade mode, which turn the screen flip back off (my videos were upside down with a straight compile).  Also, by default the code puts a tiny little menu up over your video for a bit (basically letting you know you can cycle through the videos with the left/right joystick, I think) even if you only have one video.  I was too lazy to code this to not happen when there's only one video, and simply commented out the "printNicely" statements and it disappeared.


--Donnie