New toy

September 22, 2012, 11:50:23 PM

I went to Liquidware's site and picked up a TouchShield Slide kit, with battery pack and Arduino Uno. Here's a pic of my first attempt at it. The camera was unable to focus on the image, but in fact it's very sharp in person. It's a 320x240 color touch-sensitive OLED display, and looks to be pretty easily programmed.

What do I want to do with it? Well...at the moment I have an LED voltmeter on my T-Bird where the ride control switches normally go, but with this (and the Arduino's ability to read buttstuffog and digital inputs) I could have my own super-duper gauge. I could put together something that shows volts, RPM, MPH, and whatever else I can route to it (and since the screen is touch-sensitive, that opens up other possibilities since the Arduino also has output pins).

The biggest problem will probably be coming up with ideas on what else I can do with it. I already ran into one problem, too--the software on Liquidware's site can't seem to program the Touchshield if you use an Arduino Uno -- it only works if you use the older Arduino Duemilanove. Luckily I had one...

Edit...it turns out it's really easy to upload images (must be 24bpp BMP) and draw them. I hacked this together in Paint Shop Pro and sent it to the device. My camera can't do justice to how it looks. this is a photoshopped pic that comes close to how it looks in person, though the actual contrast is much higher -- the color is much richer and the rest is a deep black. In the car it would look great.

Edit #2...I just ordered a compass and temp sensor module for it. That's two more pieces of info I could display...