Fastest GHI Board and TE35 TFT

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1

Hi,

Is the FEZ Hydra Mainboard @ 200mHz the fastest board that GHI sells? I am new to .NET micro and would like to control the TE35 touch screen with the fastest GHI CPU board because I’m concerned about screen redraw speed. I basically want to show some analog gauges on the screen along with some buttons presses represented by icons. 256 bit color is good enough. Could this setup do a 30 Hz screen refresh @ 320 x 240? Also, would I use GDI in .NET micro to code the gauges and icon presses? Where would the bitmaps be stored - ie: is SD card fast enough for reading images with a 30 Hz referesh? In actuality, I would really only need to change the dial positions in the gauges and the button pressed/unpressed look so writing to only the changed portions of the screen might be good enough.

Thanks!
Danh

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Welcome to the forum!

At the moment it is the fastest. What you describing is doable.

I would read the dial picture from resources and update only changing part - the hand.

Also check the Codeshare section. We have some cool graphics related contributions there.

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Thanks for the welcome Superhuman Architect. I’m looking forward to using the GHI .NET micro products. I hear you can test code using the emulator. Is there an emulator for the TE35 320x240 screen?

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Yes you can use default emulator.

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Awesome! I think I’m sold. I saw GUS has an example on CodeShare of an analog clock that is similar to the gauges I want to make. While I’m waiting for the hardware to come I can mess with the emulator to try to and understand how to do bitmap redraws. I’m sure I’ll be back for some more questions…

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You are welcome. Check mini pacman from @ taylorza. Good game, runs in emulator and uses bitmaps.

http://www.tinyclr.com/forum/topic?id=6915

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It was almost “freakin” easy. I loaded the PACMAN game and tried to run it on the emulator (Transport: set to Emulator, Device: set to Microsoft Emulator). I get 6 warnings about Music_42.cs I think because there is no music board. However, the last is an error: “Device not found or cannot be opened - USB:Gadgeteer”. It’s as though the system is looking for a real device instead of using the emulator. Hopefully this is some newbie setup mistake on my part.

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In project settings window last tab on the left. Select emulator as your deployment target.

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Thanks. I got the emulator showing but there are some errors “An unhandled exception of type ‘System.NotSupportedException’ occured in GHI.OSHW.Hardware.dll”. Maybe because it can’t emulate the joystick and sound hardware. I think I better take baby steps and spend some time on the GHI site looking at the tutorials for beginners. I’m gonna call it a night.

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Delete the mainboard from the setup. Emulator gets very confused with Gadgeteer. Alternatively replace it with a Cobra II; raises no errors in the emulator.

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There are some Performance tests : http://www.tinyclr.com/codeshare/entry/597