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Topic starter
2021-11-30 4:14 pm
Hello,
My name is Aaron. Professionally I am a filmmaker/animator/developer. But I've always been fascinated by electronics and programming.
In the past 6 years I've begun my journey in micro-controllers and circuits. I have no schooling in this discipline but it makes me so excited every time I learn new things!
I set out to develop a fancy set of laser tag. Started with an Adafruit Feather M0. I was quickly in over my head trying to drive a TFT, IR LED, IR Receiver, Lora Radio, lights, and buttons all from the same Arduino. I learned a lot from these hundreds of hours of failures. I imagine many of you began just as I did and I am very excited to chat with you on the forums and learn from you all.
This topic was modified 2 years ago by Aaron
2021-12-02 5:24 am
So where do you go from here? Are you going to pare down the range of sensors and add as you go?
Topic starter
2021-12-02 1:11 pm
@ev-pat Thanks for asking! I started over to some extent. I am now trying to build the core of the system on a pi 4. This will handle most of the logic and most important the screen. That was the biggest issue I had using the feather. The amount of processing time the feather was using to write to the screen was impractical. I was splitting up draw commands into tiny chunks so that other things could run in between draw calls (e.g. receive radio/IR).
With the pi all of that is solved for me. Attaching a screen just works!
As for the other sensors, I’ll need some other micro controller. The Pi, to my knowledge, is not good with exact timing on GPIO pins (I’d be happy for someone to tell me otherwise). I’ll need exact timing for the IR LED to send pulsed light. After seeing some of Bill’s videos on the Seeeduino XIAO I’m considering using that, although I haven’t looked at compatibility with IR libraries yet.
This is all just my current plan. I’m open to others here suggesting an awesome new way!