Thinking about PewPew 2

Published on 2017-08-05 in PewPew FeatherWing.

PewPew FeatherWing qualified for the finals of the Best Product category of the Hackaday Prize. That makes me very happy, as it means that I’m not the only one who thinks this is actually doable. Sure, I started simple, and then I simplified the project further along the way. But the hard part is writing the actual library and its documentation, together with the games and their tutorials.

On the library front, I started to rewrite the whole thing to make everything work on images, similar to PyGame’s Surface objects. There will no longer be commands for changing the colors of individual pixels of the display, instead you are going to send an image to it. The image class itself will have all the operations.

I also have some ideas about how to make the documentation fun to read and interesting. I’m drawing some inspiration from the famous Why’s Poignant Guide to Ruby. Only less poignant. And more, you know, actually useful. The second part of my inspiration comes from the Earth Destruction Advisory Board , which is a very important resource in this day and age.

But qualifying to the next round also made me start thinking a little more bravely about the next iteration on the idea. One with a screen. And a dedicated microcontroller to handle it. I got some more of those tiny ST7735 screens – this time horizontal, not vertical, as those only had the SPI pins broken out, and I will need parallel interface to make the display refresh fast enough. Here’s a mock-up of the feather with that screen:

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The buttons are going to have to be through-hole, as there is no way I can fit those SMD buttons so tight, but their spacing seems to look fine. I also haven’t decided what microcontroller to use — I will be testing several different possibilities, and I will probably pick the cheapest one that is fast enough. I’m now waiting for the breakout PCB for that display, so that I can breadboard it conveniently.

Hopefully I will have some games to show after the weekend.