roger allen

A few months ago I backed the Gameduino 3X Dazzler on Crowd Supply and it arrived in time for Christmas 2020. So, this year isn’t all bad, at least one good thing happened! I’ve spent a couple days playing with the Dazzler and trying to get my bearings on this device. It has definitely been a learning experience–being about 10 years since I last looked at anything Arduino-like! I thought I’d share some notes as I try to figure things out. If you have suggestions or corrections, please send them on–I’m just learning!

I ordered the Python Game Pack which is a (1) Dazzler Arduino Shield, (2) an Adafruit Metro M4, (2) a 16 GB microSD card, and (3) two Wii Classic-compatible controllers. This seemed like a fun way for my son & I to create some fun ‘old school’ multiplayer games.

When it first arrived, we assembled the Gameduino to the Metro M4 and plugged it in (HDMI to TV and USB to a power supply), but the first two TVs we tried (an older 27” Visio & a brand new Samsung Frame TV) did not register any signal at all–oh no! Trying on a 3rd (Sharp) TV worked–whew! Afterwards, trying on normal monitors–every one I’ve tried seems to work just fine. TVs are a bit more finicky for some reason.

It boots up with menu display showing pong, fruit and temperature. Sure enough, using the Wii controller allows you to choose & play Pong almost like it is 1972 again. Well, not really, this Pong is MUCH higher resolution, and for some reason the scoring is backwards. Well, this just gives an excuse for editing & fixing the included code!

Fruit is a fun variant of the “match 3 or more” icons, they disappear and new random icons drop from the top. Temperature shows a graph of the CPU temperature.

The system is running CircuitPython which is a new environment for me. When it boots up, it looks for a code.py file and executes it. If I plug the USB from the Metro M4 to my Windows laptop, the M4 appears just like a USB drive, you can see the files: code.py, pong.py, etc. Now, I could look over & understand the code. To me, it is straightforward to understand how it works, so far.

Reading about CircuitPython, it encourages you to use a dedicated editor to be sure files are saved properly (not cached) for a USB drive, so I installed & used Mu.

Mu also allows you to bring up a Python REPL & see version info. Editing with Mu is a simple affair and the CircuitPython environment detects file changes & reloads automatically. Quite nice! I was able to change the pong scoring to match my sensibilities and change paddle & background colors, etc. Just to play with the basics.

The Gameduino CircuitPython is at https://github.com/jamesbowman/py-bteve. I don’t quite grok how this repo becomes something that you can install as a CircuitPython or how you install new Python modules, but its on my list.

Next, I wanted to figure out how to get an Arduino IDE program compiled and installed. This CircuitPython setup was nice, but I was confused as to how the Arduino IDE would fit in. Eventually, I read about the UF2 Bootloader which controls how the device boots up. Currently, it was booting into CircuitPython (you see D:\CIRCUITPY on USB), but you can double-click to get it into a different bootloader mode. Here you see D:\METROM4BOOT and if you copy a FILENAME.UF2 file to that drive it reboots with that image running.

So, I learned that you want to back up & save the existing D:\METROM4BOOT\CURRENT.UF2 as that contains the Gameduino CircuitPython boot setup. I also saved the D:\CIRCUITPY drive. I actually don’t quite understand how those differ–this is on my list of things to figure out. If you copy that saved CURRENT.UF2 file to the D:\METROM4BOOT it then reboots into Gameduino CircuitPython again.

With those backed up and also following Adafruit’s suggested update of the UF2 Bootloader I felt confident to try the Arduino IDE.

Working through the setup instructions for Arduino and running a simple LED blink example, what happens is the IDE sets a new UF2 image and boots your device to run the Arduino code. Now, the G3X does not appear as a USB filesystem any longer. But, if you double-click the reset button, the D:\METROM4BOOT appears and you can copy your backup CURRENT.UF2 file to that drive to get back to CircuitPython mode.

As you can see I’m just learning the basics, but now I feel like I have my bearings. I’m hopeful this could be helpful to others who might be in a similar situation. Next, I hope to make some sort of 2-player tank game and get Asteroids running!