Maker Tom Granger has achieved the seemingly-impossible and constructed a digital camera accent for Panic’s uncommon hand-crank handheld video games console, the Playdate — impressed by the Nintendo Recreation Boy Digicam of previous.
“This mission is constructed on the shoulders of my earlier playwrite mission,” Granger explains, referring to an effort to attach a keyboard to a Playdate console to make use of it as a distraction-free digital typewriter, “wherein I additionally used a Teensy microcontroller to attach gamepads and even keyboards to the Playdate with out the necessity for a pc in-between (nicely, in actuality the Teensy is that pc). At first sight this shouldn’t be attainable, as a result of the Playdate’s USB port is a consumer, not a bunch. It will be like connecting a gamepad to a tough disk.”
The Playdate, for these unfamiliar, is an uncommon transportable console with a low-power monochrome memory-LCD show and a hand-crank controller which pops out of the facet. Inside the intense yellow chassis is an STMicro STM32F746 microcontroller on which its video games run, together with an Espressif ESP32 for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity. There is a USB Sort-C port on the backside, however that is primarily used just for charging — with one massive exception.
“The Playdate offers serial over USB,” Granger explains, “which is often utilized by the SDK [Software Development Kit]’s Simulator app operating on a pc to speak to the console (ship recreation builds, debug, reboot, take screenshots, and many others). So the Playdate is a [USB] consumer, the host being the pc. For this mission I took the final idea one step additional and transmit much more knowledge to the Playdate.”
That knowledge comes courtesy of an Omnivision OV7670 digital camera sensor, related to the Teensy and configured to seize grayscale reasonably than shade imagery — taking the YUV picture knowledge and zeroing-out U and V. The captured picture is then dithered in software program right down to a single bit, then handed alongside to the console — which is sufficient to show it on-screen, however to truly create a practical digital camera required a bit extra work.
The mission builds on Granger’s earlier playwrite, a dock which turns the console right into a distraction-free writing station. (📷: Tom Granger)
“Playdate can natively save a picture as .gif, so we try this for stills,” Granger notes. “However movies are one other story. There isn’t any strategy to encode a collection of pictures as .pdv (Playdate’s proprietary video format) or .gif. So what we do as a substitute is save all the pictures in a temp folder, the use one other C perform to encode an animated .gif and write it on the file system. All in all it runs at about 3-4 fps and that is at present the pace of the ‘movies’ we will file.”
{Hardware} design recordsdata and supply code for the mission can be found on Granger’s GitHub repository, beneath the permissive MIT license.
