First test screens

I assembled my shopping list and bought the following:

• An Arduino Mega2560
• A 4D Systems uOLED-160-G2 OLED display with Goldelox processor
• A breadboard. A big one. There will be quite a bit of signal control going on.
• Many breadboarding wires
• Assorted resistors
• Assorted capacitors
• Some Digital Potentiometers
• Relays to control the analogue signal path
• A capacitive sensor board to do touch and proximity sensing for the controls

I'm sure I'll need to buy more components later, but that's a good start.

First task was to hook up the OLED to the Arduino using the shield I bought for it. Except that it meant that you had to remove the shield to program the display because it connected to the Rx/Tx lines used for serial uploading of new code. So the shield was banished and I wired the serial display Rx/Tx to pins 16 and 17, not 0 and 1.

Now that I could load code, it was time to break out the Goldelox libraries. First of all I tried a Picasa one that seemed to work for some people, but I soon realised that was the wrong one. So I found the correct Goldelox one and everything sprang into life late on a Saturday night. The problem is that although the Arduino is happy being developed with a Mac, all 4D Systems tools are Windows based, so unless you download and disassemble the Windows installs, you can't find the libraries.

First thing to say is that the Arduino development environment whilst not as sophisticated as most modern IDEs is a lot better than I expected. Writing and loading code is easy and once you have worked out that adding a new tab means "add a new file to the project" you can soon start putting together a decent project structure. Coding is like a limited C++, which is fine by me.

 

So here is the product of a few hours coding to see what sort of easy to read display I could create that would fit in in the guitar (there's more than enough room for Arduino cards)

The iPhone I used to film this has completely washed out the colours as well as generating the video striping from different display rates. In reality and on the guitar it looks pretty decent and is very readable, so I may stick with it for now and add a unique font and background images later on when I am adding polish.