Looking ahead — Arduino vs Going It Alone

While I do have some exercises left to do before I give my final review of the XGameStation Game Console Design Starter Kit, I’m also trying to look ahead to a future project. There are a few reasons for this. The first is the obvious one– it’s because I can. Another reason, however, is because the XGS was mostly a process of getting my feet wet in prototyping, working with circuits, etc. It’s important in a self-education process to first get the feeling that you’re not going to blow it big time. Lacking a classroom environment, I basically picked something that would give me a structured process to learning how to read data sheets, work with circuits, program a microcontroller, etc. Now that I feel more comfortable, I think I can start taking on projects that are a little more complex and a little more interesting.

There’s also the other factor that the XGS isn’t the easiest platform to program for. Not only is it necessary to hand-count clock cycles to ensure you keep generating the NTSC signal correctly, but the SX has a memory architecture I find cringe-inducing. The limitations on calls, the paging system…it makes the entire process more arcane than I think it needs to be. Adding to this is the difficulty of producing color, which requires careful timing to get any given color. The XGS Pico lacks the color helper hardware of the XGS Micro.

So, I’m looking ahead to the next fish to fry. I guess I’m a product of my past in mobile devices, but I am fairly interested in something with a nice little LCD or OLED display. I’d like an SD card interface, too. USB would be handy. For UI, maybe a touch screen and a few buttons. Just a nice “screwing around” platform.

What’s interesting is that I have a few options for part sourcing on this. The first and most obvious is to purchase an Arduino and the associated TouchShield. This gets me off the ground in virtually no time and it also gives me a chance to play around with a very popular hardware platform. The Processing language is also an interesting way to work in an high-level language when you’re coding for a microcontroller. The downside, however, is that I’m not sure I’ll be learning all that much. It seems like everything is pretty much done for me at that point, from the bootloader to the parts sourcing for the display shield.

At the other end, there is the choice of completely rolling my own from scratch. This would mean selecting a microcontroller that I like (most importantly, something with in-system programming, sufficient I/O pins, and an instruction set I like), getting its programmer circuit set up, plopping down some USB and SD card support, and bringing on a touch screen part. I’m fairly okay with the idea of doing that, but I get the feeling that going this route is going to incur too much of a learning curve issue. Many of the desired parts are only available as SMT, and I don’t have tools or experience for that (yet). On top of that, I’d probably need a TON of breakout boards to get this mocked up on a breadboard, because I don’t know what other prototyping tools I’d have at my disposal. Not impossible, yes, but if I wander around in the woods too much then this blog will get very boring very quickly.

The middle-of-the-road idea is to get a prototyping board like this one from SparkFun. This has a lot of advantages. It goes ahead and takes care of a number of SMT and PCB creation concerns I have at the moment, gives me a nice through-hole prototyping area from which to work, and by the time I get things working with it, I’d probably be in a better position about rolling my own about SMT parts and my own PCB designs. At least, that’s a hope. Of course, I’d have more fun writing my own boot code, but hey…the eval boards here at work all come with sample bootloaders!

But, I still want to have an Arduino laying around, so why not do both? I can get things humming along by sketching it out with an Arduino platform, then apply what I’ve learned in designs of my own? It seems as feasible an idea as any, and with so many quick and easy things available for the Arduino platform, why not?