Nuts and Volts - May 2014

Next, you will need to download the Arduino IDE. To do this, visit the official Arduino website ( www.arduino.cc) and click the Download link at the top of the page. (The following instructions are for Windows users.) Click on the Windows Installer link and run the installation program. This will cause the Arduino IDE to be installed in the C:\Program Files (x86)\Arduino folder.

Now, download both of the Touch Shield V2.0 libraries. Visit each link in Table 2 with your web browser, and click the Download ZIP button on each page. Open each of the ZIP archives and unzip all of the contents into the C:\Program Files (x86)\Arduino\libraries folder. Because of a quirk in the way the Arduino IDE imports libraries, you will need to rename both of the folders you just created. Rename the TFT_Touch_Shield_V2-master folder to TFTscreen; rename the Touch_Screen_Driver-master folder to TFTtouch.

As you can see from the screenshots in Figures 1 and 2, the touchscreen LCD display was designed to be used in portrait mode (240x320) instead of landscape mode. As near as I can tell, there doesn’t seem to be any way to change the orientation, so you need to take this into consideration when designing games for this display. I mainly used font sizes 2, 3, and 4. Font size 1 is pretty much useless because the characters are so small they are virtually unreadable. Although finger pressure detection is very good on the touchscreen, I would recommend that you use a stylus because it is more precise and it obscures the screen less than a person’s finger. This can be a factor in playing some of the games.

Let’s look at the code for the sliding puzzle game which is shown in Table 3. You will notice that the variable declarations appear at the top of the program. There are two main sections in Arduino code: the “setup” block and the “loop” block.

The setup block is meant to hold code that is executed only once. The code in the loop block is executed over and over again.

After the loop block, I put the custom functions that were used to handle specific tasks. In the “setup” block, I wrote some code that draws the playing grid for the puzzle game using the library functions provided by Seeed Studio.

In your program code, each screen function name should be preceded by the “Tft” library object name. For example, Tft.fillScreen(0,239,0,319,BLUE); would fill the entire screen with the color blue. Here are some more examples: