Our friends at Adafruit started releasing their yearly Holiday Gift Guides this week, and the Blinky Grid SMT was featured in their Adafruit Holiday Gift Guide 2012 – Blinky:
Blinky Grid Red SMT from Wayne and Layne: This is the surface-mount version of their Blinky Grid kit, and is a great way to learn and practice surface-mount soldering. While W&L won’t say that everyone can successfully solder surface-mount, you do not need extreme dexterity or super eagle vision. They have built a bunch of these with people who have never soldered surface mount before, between seven and fifty or so years of age – and everyone has been successful!
Read more: Adafruit Holiday Gift Guide 2012 – Blinky
Our friends at Adafruit started releasing their yearly Holiday Gift Guides this week, and the Video Game Shield was featured in their Adafruit Holiday Gift Guide 2012 – Arduino Shields:
Wayne & Layne’s Video Game Shield Kit – The Video Game Shield is an Arduino add-on shield to make your own video games, including graphics, text, sound effects, and music! Using the power of open source, this Shield includes everything you need to make awesome black-and-white video games on your TV. It supports up to two Nintendo Wii Nunchuck controllers for an easy and familiar interface.
Read more: Adafruit Holiday Gift Guide 2012 – Arduino Shields
Warm fuzzies about the Blinky Grid SMT
Thomas wrote in with some kind words about the Blinky Grid SMT kit he purchased at Radio Shack:
Thank you so much for the high quality kits and excellent documentation! I recently purchased your Blinky Grid SMT kit for a teaching engagement – mostly because of the novel programming method! To say the least, everything worked out great. Building the kit was a breeze, programming and demo went well, and the kids I was working with walked away with an increased interest in electronics and programming!
Next up – Video Game Shield! Just need a free weekend! Again, keep up the great work and please, more SMT kits!!
The Blinky Grid SMT (and all the other Blinky kits) are available in the Wayne and Layne Store and also the Maker Shed store.
John from Tronixstuff recently reviewed our Blinky POV SMT kit, and really liked it! Here are some highlights from his review:
after my last attempt at working with hand soldering surface-mount components couldn’t really be called a success, I was looking for something to start again with. After a little searching around I found the subject for today’s review and ordered it post-haste.
you’ll want to put your own messages into the POV, and the process for doing so is very clever. Visit the programming page, and follow the instructions. Basically you enter the text into the form, set the POV to programming mode and hold it up against two squares on your monitor. The website will then blink the data which is received by the light-sensitive LEDs. Once completed, the POV will inform you of success or failure. This method of programming is much simpler than having to flash the microcontroller every time, well done Wayne and Layne.
We had a lot of fun with this simple little kit, and learned a thing or two about hand-soldering SMT. It can be done with components that aren’t too small, however doing so was an interesting challenge and the results were quite fun. So it met our needs very well. Anyone can do it with some patience and a clean soldering iron.
Continue reading… Adventures with SMT and a POV SMT Kit
Photos by John Boxall
Every discussion forum on the web is only as good as its best members, and Wayne and Layne has been very fortunate to have forum member trodoss contributing to the W&L forum. In addition to being very quick to help answer other’s questions and helping us flag and remove spam posts, trodoss has contributed a couple of really cool games for the Video Game Shield. This is the second post highlighting the outstanding work trodoss has done in designing new games for the Video Game Shield. Yesterday we talked about the top-down adventure game (like the Legend of Zelda) Elventure.
Today’s game is called Poofy Adventure, and is a side-scrolling “platformer adventure game where Poofy gathers up fruit while avoiding snakes.” It’s been quite challenging (I haven’t gotten very far so far) and the use of realistic jumping physics is quite impressive!
You can download Poofy Adventure from the trodoss-arduino repository at Google Project Hosting. Here is the link to the latest Poofy Adventure code, you simply need to download the zip archive and unzip into a “poofy_adventure” folder in your Arduino sketchbook directory. We’ve incorporated the code into the Video Game Shield code archive on our download page and in the W&L Github repository.
Every discussion forum on the web is only as good as its best members, and Wayne and Layne has been very fortunate to have forum member trodoss contributing to the W&L forum. In addition to being very quick to help answer other’s questions and helping us flag and remove spam posts, trodoss has contributed a couple of really cool games for the Video Game Shield. We’ll be featuring these new games in some upcoming blog posts.
The first game is called Elventure, and is a top-down “adventure game where an intrepid elf explores the realm, gathering hidden treasure.” It’s really well done, and honestly we’re amazed at how much trodoss was able to do with such a simple platform. Remember how much better the graphics and gameplay were in Super Mario Bros. 3 compared to the original Super Mario Bros, despite running on the same exact hardware? This is sorta the same thing here, I never though we’d see a “Legend of Zelda” kind of game running on a lowly Arduino, so this is very exciting!
The game features an intrepid elf player character who journeys around the expansive map in search of gems, weapons, armor, and other items. The game has multiple types of enemies and different zone and tile textures, along with really fantastic music. There is even an overworld/underworld map you can download if you get stuck :- )
You can download Elventure from the trodoss-arduino repository at Google Project Hosting. Here is the link to the latest Elventure code, you simply need to download the zip archive and unzip into an “elventure” folder in your Arduino sketchbook directory. We’ve incorporated the code into the Video Game Shield code archive on our download page and in the W&L Github repository.
Save 10% on all kits and components with coupon code BTS2012 at checkout. Sale ends September 1, so act fast!
Just a quick update to let you all know that the code for the Video Game Shield has been updated to support knock-off Nunchucks! What does this mean? Well, for a long time the standard way of interfacing with the Nintendo Wii Nunchucks from an Arduino (using the I2C two-wire protocol) didn’t really work with the cheap knock-off (off-brand) Nunchucks for sale at places like Deal Extreme and Ebay. Fortunately, we recently stumbled upon some updated code that works with all Nunchucks, official as well as knock-off, so we’ve tested it out and updated the Video Game Shield code.
The new code can be found on our download page as well as the Video Game Shield repository at GitHub.
We are shopping around trying to find the best of the cheap knock-off Nunchucks, so look forward to us adding them to the Wayne & Layne store in the near future!
Wayne and Layne vacation!
Due to an upcoming wedding, Wayne and Layne will be shipping all orders received between July 20th, 2012, and July 31st, 2012, on July 31st.
Update – We’re back at work, and all pending orders have been shipped!
Over at the Instructables website, user avionicskypilot777 has been working on a write-up of his projects. We really liked his review of the Blinky Grid kit, and have re-posted it below. Thanks for the kind words, avionicskypilot777!
This was a fun kit to build and easy to solder. Good kit for anyone needing to practice solder skills. I bought the kit from wayneandlayne.com
It is programmed using their website programming page. It uses 2 light sensors to sense the clock and data signals that are sent by the website. Just enter program using their entry form and hold the sensors up to your monitor screen and start programming. The programming time depends on the timing set in ms and the length of the message. It can take awhile and some patience to learn how to program it. But once it’s figured out it’s a breeze. One of my messages took 4 minutes to load at a speed of 70ms. That is rather slow but I don’t get errors at that speed. Generally I can run anywhere between 50 and 70 ms transmission rate. It’s just a trial and error procedure. Don’t give up! It works real well and a good starter project! Highly recommend it! I can’t remember the kit price but for the cost the quality of the kit is excellent! They even threw in some extra LED’s in case there was a bad one or I messed one up. I mounted the project on a piece of plastic with a 9V battery holder attached. I used hot glue, which I find very handy when doing projects. It’s non corrosive, waterproof, and cools quickly. Great for electronic work.