Colour Maximite

I have taken Geoff's project, and had a really good play with it...

The project's pages are here.. http://geoffg.net/maximite.html

I first saw this when Bryan posted the original system in the forum... I thought " If only it were colour".... Guess what!!!! He has done just that.

It has 8 colours available, which does give a reasonable palette... He has made four modes... 1 through 4... Mode 1 is the original mode black and white 480x432 pixels... Mode 2 has the same size screen resolution but a choice of 4 colour palettes... Mode 3 is the main mode with 480x432 and all 8 colours... Whilst a gaming mode Mode 4 has half the resolution and all 8 colours .

I purchased a UBW32 ( bitwacker ) from proto pic. http://proto-pic.co.uk/usb-32-bit-whacker-pic32mx795-development-board/

I bought a SD module http://proto-pic.co.uk/breakout-board-for-sd-mmc-cards/

And all the other little devices from Farnell ( Elements ) VGA connector, B/Backed clock circuitry, connectors etc...

All together I think I've spent around £50... Its not bad for a prototype system...

First off I need to put some headers on the UBW32 board.
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And a pickit3 header on the top.
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The next exercise is to take a piece of stripboad and "try" and mount all the gubbins I need to run this thing...
I had to sacrifice several connections near the SD card so I could route the relevant pins to where they needed to go..
( They weren't where they needed to be ) After pulling around 10 connectors out of the headers I managed to wire it up.

I placed a good deal of connections UNDER the UBW32 as to make it look nicer... My end result was this..
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As you can see... Not brilliant, but functional...

Before I went any farther, I connected the device up to pickit3... Downloaded the firmware ( You import the hex file into MPLAB )
REMEMBER to set the pickit3 power to 3.3v in the config page in MPLAB... Otherwise, MPLAB won't see it... Once pugged in, I uploaded the firmware onto the UBW32 board...

Reconnected via USB ( install the driver from Geoff's site )... You can now converse with the Maximite basic interface...

I place the UBW32 in its socket on my new prototype board... Powered it up.. I saw the SD card LED flicker... WOW!!! It worked straight off

Here's the setup as it sits on my desk.
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The PSU (wallwart for you Americans) is 12V DC but the little 5V reg on board got a little hot... So I placed the little LM2490T-8 in circuit to help dissipate the voltage drop.

As you can see I have a 4 way KVM switch with an opening free... The monitor and keyboard plugged in..
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I had also downloaded all the examples from the web... I put them on my SD card....
I wrote a small program using the little knowledge I had and saved it as "myprog.bas".. I know.. Original isn't it.
Saved it to the SD card.. To run the program you type.... "run".
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Here's my little program running... A couple of sprites, a couple of texts and an analogue pin read.
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To see what files are on the SD card you just type "files" and it will list the root directory..
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You can manipulate the SD card just as easy as MSDOS... I played with most of the commands to see how things worked. On the whole, it worked as expected, it was a joy to play with..

We are playing at the moment with dithering, so we can display pictures and make the look as good as we can.
Here's a photo of the "Chuckle brothers".... It came out pretty good.
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I'm going to play more and update this blog... I think its a little winner ( to say this is software generated 8 colour VGA signals )

Cheers Geoff... Thanks for sorting the little bug out...