nice, the bump up to 230400 baud on the hardware serial port really helps frame rates as well.
I got around needing a serial proxy by just passing a reference to the Stream object type. Both the Arduino hardware serial ports and NewSoftSerial (beta 11 and newer) are of this type, so you can setup whatever kind of serial port you want, pass it to your constructor and everything just works.
Thanks to the 4D Labs support, the new release 6 implements sound playing.
Actually, the 4D Labs ?LCD-32PT(SGC) 3.2” Serial LCD Display Module requires up to 250 mA, more than the Arduino built-in regulator could provide, when it plays sound.
CAUTION The latest NewSoftSerial release 11 is required for the abstraction layer. Although the library is now named SoftwareSerial, rename it to NewSoftSerial.
Great job, well done, i can't wait for more features to come.
I'm also working on something pretty nice for the display, it is hardware related. A box that will have a space for an Arduino Mini Pro, gps sensor, rtc, lipo battery and more...
Here's a very ugly rendering, a simple teaser. It's all aluminum, anodised, CNC made, half inch overall thin only. Built-in Ports are also accessible from the back. SD card has an openning. No screw visible.
The display viewing Area is not centered on that axis.
Yep, I forgot about the icon strip down one side.
i'm not sure yet about these mounting holes.
Personally I'd make a custom board to fit if such a neat-looking enclosure was available, so just a few generic mounts would be OK for that. In fact unless you stipulate the exact model of GPS, RTC etc (which would be very limiting) I think generic is what you have to do.
Have you approached 4DS about sponsoring this? I know they are inclined to get involved if they like a project.
Thanks to the work of the chipKIT / MPIDE team, the hardware serial class for the chipKIT platform is derived now from the Stream class as NewSoftSerial and i2cSerial are.
More important for LCD_Serial, the new release 13 offers multiple options: hardware, software and I2C serial ports can be used to drive the screen.
It can now be used by other libraries, as Serial_GPS.
It includes utilities like ftoa
Let's have some fun! I ported this game of life and it runs pretty fast on the chipKIT.
Integers only, pixels updated if changed, fast serial at 115200.