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...
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...
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:
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?
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
Just do a search for a 4 wire resistive touch screen.
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)
Still no video of this in action? 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...
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.
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.
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
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!)