pouët.net

Hi everyone,

I'm not sure this is either the right place or even the right site at all. If it isn't please tell me and I'd be happy to remove/edit this post.

Anyway, my company is building a graphing calculator for students in high school. It's a nice constrained environment with a QVGA color screen, and we thought it could be a great platform to write demos for.

We're thinking about setting up a contest where the author of the best demo would win a device, but we don't know if that's something we could/should do.

What do you think?

Is there anything you can tell us about the hardware itself?

Sure! Here's a summary and here are all the detailed specs.

I was thinking of more like:
1. Audio
2. Screen refresh rate
3. Disk access / file system / file transfer

Looks like there's plenty of documentation at least, and schematics look decent enough. Do you have some kind of SDK? Would probably be a whole bunch of work to get the hardware initialized. Especially without any actual hardware to test with, since that is the prize.

Gargaj: refresh rate would depend on how cleverly you're able to use the ST7789V. Don't imagine it'd be a huge issue to drive QVGA from a 100 MHz Cortex-M4

I wonder how this compares to PocketCHIP. I guess this calculator thing is a bit smaller and more integrated..

Tjoppen: I didn't necessarily mean refresh rate as the logic, more whether the actual physical display has any ghosting like e.g. most of the e-book readers go, i.e. is it suited for realtime graphics.

Tjoppen: you can finds the sdk here

The screen should be perfectly suited for real-time graphics (it's a TFT LCD panel).

The code needed to actually boot the device can be quite small actually. You can have a look at the drivers we wrote for the original OS if you want.

I probably won't be making a demo for this, but I have to say I absolutely love the concept and the look of the device.

So no sound then? :(

I can't see anything that even hints at it having any sound capabilities, so that kinda limits it as a demo platform.

I did find a quote there saying that theoretical lcd update speed is about 200Hz, so real-time graphics is definitely doable.

I think it's really cool that you go full open source with both hardware and software. Kudos for that. And yes the design of that machine is nice and clean as well.
Looks like a really cool tool to play with.

How could I enter a competition where I make a demo for a device I don't already have?

Emulators are (said to be) your friend

From what I can tell, there's a simulator that uses FLTK underneath for PC, but that's about it; no real emulator. This would provide no information about how a given program would run on the actual hardware, making it very difficult to do anything that would push the device. Some simple/stylish stuff could probably be done conservatively, but the lack of audio puts further limits on that aspect as well. For me at least, it's a bit of a tough sell to want to make a demo for this without owning actual hardware first.

That said, the calculator itself does look like a nice product, and definitely something I would have _loved_ to have played with in my high school days :)

Ecco2: Give away 10 devices to interested people and you'll probably get 3 demos.

yeah, was about to point out how are people supposed to test things on it when they don't have the device already, but others already mentioned that.

maybe sponsoring a specific demoparty asking them to hold a special compo for your product, where you lend interested visitors the hardware during the party time, for them to try to do stuff with it, and the best entries get to keep the hardware. worked nicely at evoke for that cozmo robot thing.

Sound - the rgb leds are driven by timer pins. Replace the led with a piezo buzzer and let Mr. Beep loose :)

Ecco2: looks cool! Please do include a minijack in the next rev :) .

Now I feel kind of stupid for not figuring out this chicken-and-egg problem before: obviously one would need the actual device to write anything even remotely close to pushing the hardware a little…

By the way, there is indeed no audio (it's forbidden in a lot of exams), but one could theoretically bit-bang audio on the USB port ^^ (it can be accessed as a GPIO).

Now the problem is we can't afford to offer too many devices. Plus we kinda liked the idea of a contest : people would invest time and we would thank (at least some of) them with a free device.

psenough's idea of lending some devices during a demoparty (I had no idea this was a thing) seems like a very good solution. Who could we organize such a thing?

And by the way, thank you guys very much for the kind feedback and the warm welcome :)

you can find list of upcoming demoparties at demoparty.net

check out their webpages and ping the organizers of the ones that might make more sense.

you seem to be french, or based in france so maybe cookie demoparty would be a nice fit?