Bare-metal mbed; the Gameduino bouncing ball
(Last modified 6 Jan 2012)

Since I hooked the Gameduino (GD) to the mbed and did some text (check here), it only makes sense that I do some graphics, too.  The simplest graphics to add is James Bowman's animated bouncing ball demo, so that's what I did.  Here is a short video of my version of the bouncing ball.  It starts with a second or so of text (from the original gd_test program), then shows the ball bouncing around (.mov file, right-click and view with QuickTime or VLC):

mbed bouncing the Gameduino ball


In order to add in James' demo code, I needed to add the GD_uncompress routine to my gdsupport library.  The porting from the original C++ to the ANSI C that I prefer to use was straightforward.  The resulting mbed executable weighs in at 17.5 KB and runs the animation at 72 frames per second on a 96 MHz mbed.  According to James, the limiting factor for frame rate in this demo is usually the SPI bus speed.  The code running the animation you see here is using an SPI clock of 4 MHz.  SPI clock rates of 1 MHz and 8 MHz (the maximum the GD can accept) both showed 72 frames/sec frame rate, as well.

You can download the source for my gd_test program, as well as a ready-to-load executable file, from this zip archive.

Note that you will not be able to rebuild from my sources until I get around to putting my full GD library on the site.  But you can look through the source for the test file to see how to hook into the GD and make things happen.

The only changes I made to James' original bouncing ball source were to replace all of his C++ class invocations with my corresponding C function calls and replace his use of 'byte' with 'char' or 'signed char', as appropriate.  Note that I did have to modify his ball.h file, as the file's draw_ball() function used incomplete argument lists when invoking his xsprite method; I've included my updated ball.h for your review.

Next up, StarCraft 2 on the mbed!  (OK, maybe not...)





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