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» Kernel Hacking: Connect an SSD1289 LCD to a Beaglebone
» New Moderators: Tari, Weregoose, Xeda112358 » More Prizm Gaming: 3D and OverClui » United-TI Forum Archives Open at Cemetech
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Kernel Hacking: Connect an SSD1289 LCD to a Beaglebone Published by KermMartian on May 17, 2012 at 11:49:04 AM CST | Discuss this article (4)
As many of you may know, I recently purchased a Beaglebone, having gotten fed up waiting for the Raspberry Pi to become a reality. The Beaglebone is an embedded development board showcasing Texas Instruments' AM335x line of System-on-a-Chip (SoC) MPUs. For the $90 board, you get a USB slave and host, a 32-bit ARM processor, 256 MB of off-chip DDR RAM, about 60 3.3v GPIO pins, an Ethernet port, and all sorts of other fun things. I have eventual goals of building a complete device around the processor, so the Beaglebone is a great way to prototype as I go. Of course, almost any device I'd want to build needs a screen of some sort, so my first major challenge was interfacing an LCD. I chose a 320x240 pixel touchscreen with an SSD1289 controller, which I purchased for less than $20. I read enough to know that the AM335x has an on-board LCD controller, or LCDC, but the easy stuff ended there. There's a lot of documentation on the internet about TI's LCDC Raster Engine, but very little documentation or code for the LCDC LIDD Engine, used to operate more intelligent LCD panels, so I hope to document here a lot of the lessons that I learned trying (painfully) to work with it. Since my current distro of choice for my Beaglebone is Angstrom, I'll also be discussing my lessons compiling kernel modules and patches for Angstrom. At the end of this article, you can download a patch to add SSD1289 support for 240x320 LCDs to your Beaglebone (or, with some work, another platform). Continue reading this article... Permalink New Moderators: Tari, Weregoose, Xeda112358 Published by KermMartian on May 9, 2012 at 1:55:50 PM CST | Discuss this article (12) With our recent takeover of United-TI, our blossoming Casio Prizm coding community, and many popular projects that have been gaining more attention of late, Cemetech's activity is moving ever-higher. As you may know, we here at Cemetech believe in the importance of quality over quantity, though, so we measure ourselves in the refinement and polish of our projects, the correctness of our spelling and grammar, and the elevation of our respect for each other's technical prowess over things like postcount and visitor count. Maintaining a high standard is generally easy when you have a large userbase of like-minded coders and hackers who audit their own posts and topics. Even the most seasoned users are bound to occasionally make errors, though, and new users who haven't fully absorbed our rules and culture may make accidental or intentional faux pas. Thus we have a hierarchy of Cemetech staff, from myself as Founder at the top, to administrators, global moderators, and moderators. I am happy to welcome three new staff members to the Cemetech team. Tari, also known as IkariTari or TheTari, has been with us for just shy of six years. He initially started as a calculator programmer and real-life friend of Jonimus/TheStorm, but quickly moved on to computer programming, embedded development, and hardware hacking. Like myself, he is interested in the low-level mechanics of how things work, and in recognition of his hardware expertise and level-headed leadership style, I am happy to welcome him as a new global moderator. With the absorption of the United-TI forum and file archives come a few dedicated staff members that the Cemetech staff felt deserved a place of recognition here. TI-BASIC coder extraordinaire Weregoose, previously recognized for his skills with the distinction of "Cemetech Expert", has been made the moderator of the TI-BASIC subforum. We feel this is a well-deserved promotion, and look forward to him continuing to share his impressive optimization skills with us. Finally, but certainly not least, Xeda112358 is a relatively recent addition to Cemetech and to the TI programming community, but has shown great promise with her work on Grammer and BatLib, projects to expand the complexity of on-calculator programming. We welcome her as the z80 Assembly subforum moderator, replacing the sadly inactive Chipmaster, and look forward to more progress on her projects once she returns from a summer hiatus. Please join me in warmly welcoming these three new staff members. Permalink More Prizm Gaming: 3D and OverClui Published by KermMartian on May 2, 2012 at 1:54:59 AM CST | Discuss this article (18) From the day that the Casio Prizm was first announced, I have been impressed with the polished, professional C and BASIC programs the coders of Cemetech have dreamed and created. Today we'll be focusing on the newest accomplishments of AHelper, gbl08ma, and PierrotLL. Two of the three programs are 3D games, an area that we've only recently begun to explore on the Prizm. The first 3D program was Graph3DP, my color 3D graphing utility for the Prizm of which the first beta has been released. 3D on the Prizm has been brought even further by AHelper, who first ported over a 3D rendering engine with occlusion, colors, polygons, and even lighting, then added textures and full-screen rendering. You can see the log of AHelper's 3D engine development on the Cemetech forum, complete with videos and animated GIFs of the engine's development. His work culminated in a two-player 3D checkers game for the Prizm, which you can download from the Prizm fx-CG10/cg20 Games section of the Archives. Three entries were submitted to the Planete Casio 48-Hour Prizm Contest, which also focused on 3D programs. In the genre of 3D games, CubeField by PierrotLL stood out as truly 3D, and a great port of a game that has also been ported to the Nspire calculator. We look forward to CubeField arriving in the Cemetech archives soon. Rounding off recent Prizm developments at Cemetech, gbl08ma has taken Ashbad (and others') work on Prizm overclocking and created a new, simplified overclocking program called OverClui. You can slide the calculator's speed along a scale from 3.6MHz all the way up to 94.3MHz, close to twice as fast as the calculator's native speed. Be sure to check out all of these new releases on your own Prizm and post your feedback, congratulations, and suggestions in the projects' threads below! Downloads and Discussion Topics Left to right: CubeField by PierrotLL, Checkers3D by AHelper, 3D Engine Test by AHelper, and OverClui by Gbl08ma Permalink United-TI Forum Archives Open at Cemetech Published by KermMartian on April 21, 2012 at 4:47:39 PM CST | Discuss this article (13) As announced earlier this week, Cemetech has taken over long-standing calculator community forum United-TI. First started in 2003, United-TI was formed out of the merger of several existing programming groups who shared a common goal of producing great projects and teaching new programmers the ropes of calculator development. It is with a heavy heart that we watch them finally close up shop nine years later, but I am happy to report that the valuable United-TI archives have been safely preserved in their full glory here on Cemetech. The United-TI Forum Archives at Cemetech contain 135,000 of United-TI's posts in thousands of topics, fully-browseable for reference. In the past week, we have put together the necessary code to display the United-TI forums here on Cemetech from their original database, and though work continues on fine-tuning the results, especially BBCode rendering, all forum contents are now available. To ease the transition, you can link your Cemetech and United-TI accounts to show your United-TI username and posting records in your Cemetech profile. In addition, we will be adding a feature that lets you link Cemetech and United-TI topics, so that you can continue discussion from your United-TI topics on the Cemetech forum. We welcome the United-TI forums to their final resting place, and we especially welcome United-TI's userbase. If you are new to Cemetech, don't forget to introduce yourself, say hello in the SAX chat widget at the left side of the page (or on #cemetech on irc.efnet.net), and share your current projects. United-TI Tools Permalink | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
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