Now after assembling my own MAKERbuino, I finally found the time to make a quick-and-dirty adapter using the Arduino Uno myself. I was surprised that it worked on the first try and that the video quality is pretty good:
I tried this myself, and it’s working almost perfectly for me except for one problem: the bottom of the picture is cut off on my TV. The output image is clear and stable, but the image is shifted down and to the right, the bottom 4-8 pixels are cut off, and I can’t find any setting on my TV that lets me adjust overscan. Also, the leftmost column has a single black pixel every 8 or so lines, and the picture goes crazy when I’m in the loader.
I’m wondering if it’s a problem with the TV or the output signal. The TV is a relatively small flatscreen that was bought from a secondhand store. It might be because it’s an NTSC television, but I’ve heard that even cheap digital TVs are multi-region, and since the output picture is solid for most games I feel like that shouldn’t be the problem. I also tried using a black and white CRT TV, but that TV is having some serious issues that are unrelated. It does look like the entire picture is sent out, though, and occasionally (when the CRT’s vertical hold cooperates) it looks like the picture is correctly aligned on the CRT. Does anybody have some idea about what might be wrong, or is it just because I have a cheap TV?
I would sometimes get a corrupted picture that would be fixed by resetting the arduino. I must have reset it dozens of times while testing, so I think it’s not a synchronization problem.
That is the synchronization bug I’ve meant. I thought your misaligned/cutoff image on the TV was caused by that. That’s why I asked if you’ve already reset the arduino a couple of times
Then there’s another problem causing your error. How long is the cable between the MAKERbuino and the Arduino? And how long is the cable between the arduino and your TV?
When I was testing my TV-Adapter I used the MAKERbuino Multiplayercable and some jumper wires to connect the MAKERbuino to the arduino which was in fact too long to transmit the signal properly. Changed to a much shorter cable did the trick for me.
Hmm, most of the wires I used were very short. The longest component was the a/v cable, but even that wasn’t very long. It seems about the normal length for such a cable. I can post a picture of my setup soon in case there are any obvious mistakes I made.
Unfortunately it doesn’t work with jonnection’s video player as he’s accessing the SD card during playback. And the SD card uses the same MOSI and SCLK pins as the TV out Arduino. Maybe I can modify the code so the Arduino only receives data when LCD_CE is active low.
But it’s fun!
Designed a small TV out PCB that should plug in the side of the MAKERbuino. Just ordered a few of these. I added an option to monitor LCD_CS so data sent to the SD card (SCLK, MOSI) doesn’t get interpreted as screen data. Let’s hope it works…
Hi @albertgajsak
I am using Altium Designer (and sometimes P-CAD). Boards should be here in a few days… I’ll keep you posted! I’m having a lot of fun with the MAKERbuino. Watch this space…
