First contact with a Gamebuino - mixed feelings

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First contact with a Gamebuino - mixed feelings

Postby LeBidouilleur » Wed Aug 06, 2014 6:35 pm

Got my Gamebuino, and one very happy kid for a while.

My 12 years old son was very excited, waiting for it and willing to program some games with it (he used scratch, we do some arduino robotics together).

I think I faced all the problems I read here, they are almost solved, but let's take a tour :

- within the first 5 minutes, trying the games on the SD, several games where not working and killed the loader.
After flashing the file, all I got was a blank screen.
btn C + reboot did the job, but some games where KO.
Right now, some of the games still don't work (all copied back from the github archive)
The next step will be to reformat FAT16 the SD card and/or try another one (not sure to have such a small one)

- After less than 10 minutes, the screen was going black - The classic problem.
Did try the settings, didn't help. Pressing the screen there or there showed a little change, but was not usable.
After searching the forum, I decided to clean the contacts.
Went fine, cleaned them, rebuilt the console (Doesn't scare me, but I do understand people that are afraid to broke something)
As for now, the screen problem is not yet fixed. It's very sensitive.
After cleaning, it went black again.
The little plastic piece on top of the screen was pushing too hard, the PCB was very curved.
I reduced it's height, used some rubber on the other side to pinch the screen against the PCB without damaging the PCB.
A little better, but always very sensitive, hardly usable.
I took it apart again, cleaned again.
Saw that some of the PCB contacts had a notable amount of solder, other nearly none: that makes a height difference between the contacts,
and I guess the rubber connector can't match such a difference with a reasonable pressure.

I'm wondering if I should remove the extra solder or put some more on the other contacts, but looks a little tricky.
What do you think ?

As per my experience and what I read here, this screen is the main hardware point of failure of the console.

- Next, I switched off the console with a game running (not flashing the eeprom).
The console wouldn't boot again.
btn C + reset wasn't helping this time, bootloader was gone.

I setup my arduino IDE with the board definitions, was able to upload a game to the console, and from there, loader was fine again.
(sometimes have to press C several times. first time, "flashing..." then game again, second time "flashing.." then back to game, third time "flashing..." and finally loader is there.)
But now, btn-C + reset does not work anymore.
Not funny when the games on the SD continue to bug.

So, I'll have to burn the bootloader. I will try the Jonnection bootloader : viewtopic.php?f=12&t=932
This is doable. I got a USBASP device, and know how to do. But this seems a daunting task for an Arduino newbie.
Hope it won't crash again. You don't always have a pc and a USBASP with you.

- Last thing, my son was asking why the "RX" led wasn't blinking while uploading a sketch.
Well, the led is not there. To be more precise, is was soldered, but broken somewhere before my house, so no RX led.
No big deal, was not an important feature.

So, am I happy with this little toy ?

Well, surprisingly the answer is YES !

The goal was for my son to learn to program.
Programming games, moreover on a console, is very appealing and in a few hours he managed to do many things.
Using the English API doc, he was able to play sounds, create and display sprites, make them move,
use the collision detection functions (BTW, when using with 2 objects of different size, place the small one first, else some cases of collision are not ok)
There is an enormous amount of work within the GB libraries, and I think it's what makes it great.

Rodot did a very good job putting that together, and I'm very thankful for that.

Now, the physical screen remains the big problem. With it and the low quality sd card I seem to have, the console is more of a dev prototype than a usable console.
I know what it is to work with Chinese parts, refurbished screens aso; I'm not throwing the stone.
We (my son and I) are just a little disappointed that it is not a seamless experience (especially the hardware parts - screen and sd).

I hope that those problems will be solved for everyone, and that the next batch of GB will be more stable. It deserves to.

Continue the good job !
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Re: First contact with a Gamebuino - mixed feelings

Postby rodot » Wed Aug 06, 2014 7:16 pm

Hey there,

It seems that you had all the different problems possible with your Gamebuino! it's really bad luck, I'm sorry to hear that :(

About the different problems you encountered:
- Bad screen quality: I was really disappointed too, I had a talk with my supplier and it's way better now. If you screen is defective please contact me at support(at)gamebuino(dot)com so we can arrange a replacement. You can also get on from eBay for about $2.5 including shipping.
- Unstable bootloader: Initially the Gamebuino only supported the original Arduino bootloader with no SD game loading at all. Myndale developed the SD-compatible bootloader and it worked fine with all the Gamebuino prototypes. We couldn't expect compatibility issues when going to he mass-production step. I tried the experimental bootloader v2.0 by Jonnection and it seems to solve the compatibility issues, but still needs further testing. I don't think the problem comes from the micro SD cards.
- Collision detection bug: it has been solved in the last version of the library
- broken RX LED: I'm sorry about that, I might have missed that during assembly & testing

Problems may seem "common" when you look at the installation & troubleshooting forum, but don't forget there are almost 1000 running Gamebuino out there, and barely a few dozen people who had problems. Moreover I'm a student in mechanical engineering (not electronics neither computer science) and it's the first time I create a project like that, so I consider it's not thaaat bad ^^ Of course it will get way better now that we know where the problems are. And yes this first batch of 1000 was more a dev batch than a really finished a polished product. I hope that in less than one year this project will have enough maturity and stability to be deployed on a larger scale (schools? hacker spaces?).

I'm glad you still enjoy your Gamebuino, don't hesitate if you have any question :)

Edit: yes you should make the solder even on the screen's pads on the PCB. Actually there was not supposed to be solder at all here (just the HASL), now I asked my supplier that they put tape on the stencil so the future batch will have even contacts.
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Re: First contact with a Gamebuino - mixed feelings

Postby jonnection » Wed Aug 06, 2014 8:17 pm

Rodot, you can really pat yourself on the back. For 1 student to pull something like this off is no small feat. Gameboys and such are usually created by a big team of specialists, not by one person !

I wanted to show you this:

Image

It's my original Nokia 5110. I do not know if you have ever owned / opened a Nokia phone from that era, but the quality of mechanical design in these phones was something simply beautiful. The structure is so rigid, it is almost like a piece of metal. You can twist it, drop it, anything. Only the exhangeable covers will come off, as they were supposed to.

Nokia mechanical designers at that time were absolutely the best in the world, and I have had the pleasure of meeting some of them. My first summer job in design was working on renderings of 3310, which was also a great phone. The fact that Nokia no longer makes phones is very sad. Modern Samsung phones do not come anywhere close in terms of the level of pure quality in mechanics.

In any case, point of story is this. In Nokia 5110 phone, the display & PCB is sandwiched between a very rigid front frame which is held by snaps and several torx-screws in a also very rigid b-cover. Nokia designers never relied on the PCB to provide enough electromechanical contact. Force in contacts (car chargers, SIM cards, battery) was almost always provided separately by a mechanical element.
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