RGB Colour Mixer with DS touch screen

Yeah for anyone buying a touch screen to use for this kind of project, I would also recommend buying a breakout board for it. I cut the ribbon cable (very carefully) between each contact and soldered and heat-shrinked each one but it's not ideal...

Mowcius

For the price of the replacement DS touch screens, I would highly recommend using them on projects because they are pretty good and transparent which provides endless other uses...

Potentiometrs would have been cheaper :wink: But not as cool.

Is it possible to connect the TFT screens to the Arduino? has anyone done that?

Yes potentiometers would not have been as cool...

Anyway I used the DS touch screen because I had one lying around... I only did the project to find it a use,,,

As far as I know, the DS LCD screens themselves have not been connected to the arduino but it should be possible with another board including ram and another IC like they have on the arduino touch shields... You would probably have to make it yourself though and unfortunately I do not have that much expertise...

Btw, if you want to comment on any other projects I could do or take a look at the pile of stuff I have then please look at:

http://www.arduino.cc/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1243337100

Mowcius

Any videos of this in action yet?

I've just recently been altering some code to make it a bit better (not finished yet) so I will post one in a day or so...

I am going to alter this to use with the BlinkM MaxM when I get mine in a week or so, maybe I will wait till then for a video...

Mowcius

Hello - This is very cool. Is there a way to get an smaller size?

I'm currently using 1 potentiometer for a project but I would like add the "cool factor" and replace the potentiometer with an small touchscreen (2x5cm inch aprox) and some square leds behind to show the position?

The DS screen would be big for what I need so is there any other thing I can use and not necessarily a touchscreen per say?

Thanks

It looks like the smallest you can get is 1.8" diagonal made for small phones etc and then you can get varying other sizes going up to about 15" but most places seem to want to sell a couple of thousand so they may be difficult to get hold of.

The DS touch screen is easy to get hold of and relatively cheap and you don't have to buy thousands :smiley:

Just do a search for a 4 wire resistive touch screen.

Mowcius

How did you go about connecting the DS touchscreen to wires you could use in the breadboard? i have one (well two actually as i assume i will mess up the connection on at least one!) and would love any tips for how you went about it. My current plan is a to cut between the wires using a modelling knife.

Does anyone know of a way to get rid of the plastic overlay thats on the wires then it would be easy to connect wires at the base of the wires.

I just did it carefully with a sharp pair of scissors and then laid 4 wires on the connectons and soldered them up with some heatshrink round it to stop the joint flexing so much... I didn't remove any plastic or anything...

Anternatively, if you like surface mount soldering you can buy the touch screen connector from sparkfun... I presume that it works with both the DS and DS lite touch screens (it looks like it should)

Hope this helps,

Mowcius

Still no video of this in action? :frowning: I've added one to my Wish list (2.99 free shipping on eBay, can't beat that!), but I'd love to see how yours looks while functioning :).

Oh, sorry. I dismantled it to use some of the parts as I still only have one arduino! If I remember then I will still try to a get a video done eventually. The LEDs on the picture were not evenly matched so it didn't mix very well and I have not got round to playing with the i2c commands for my blinkm maxm yet...

Mowcius

Alright, well thanks for the update anyways :P!

I know it says in the code where to connect the pins from the screen, but could you please write it out? For some reason I'm having trouble understanding it. A picture would be useful if you have one :P.

NEVERMIND. I believe I get it now.. :smiley:

Ok, cool. Just say if you need any help with anything else.

Mowcius

Just a quick comment to anyone still looking at this. In my first posted code there are some weird numbers to get the values right for PWMing the LEDs, if you are going to do something similar then you want to 'map' the values from the touch screen to get them within the right range for the PWM.

Mowcius

if you are going to do something similar then you want to 'map' the values from the touch screen to get them within the right range for the PWM.

No idea what that means (I'm still a noob :P) but alrighty! haha :smiley:

No idea what that means (I'm still a noob) but alrighty! haha

Well I did some rubbish like this:

analogWrite(LEDB, touchX/4 -18)

to get the values correct for the PWM (altering the brightness of the LEDs)

I should have used the map function:
http://arduino.cc/en/Reference/Map
to change the values from the touch screen into values from 0-255 for the PWM.

It is just a much better and more accurate way to do it...

Mowcius

Oh so instead of using the 0-1024 produced by analogRead(), you use Map to change them to 0-255 used for PWM?

Yeah.
Well you don't get quite the full range from analog reading on the touch screen, you normally get close to it but not quite... So the map function sets it right :smiley:

You don't get 0-1024 on analog read, you get 0-1023...

So basically if you wanted 1-1024 then you would need to map it still (or add 1!)

Mowcius