HDMI shield for Arduino projects

[ardutv]

After over 10 years of using Arduino Boards I never found a solution for drawing text and graphics to a normal monitor or television using a standard HDMI interface... So I decided to design a board myself that it can work with all Arduino Boards (including the simple UNO).

I’ll be launching this soon on CrowdSupply. If you’d like to support the project, please consider subscribing—it means a lot

ArduTV is an easy-to-install interface designed for Arduino boards. It can display simple text and graphics on every television or monitor using just one HDMI cable. The interface uses one SPI and almost no other host board resources—all graphics routines are run on a dedicated FPGA.

By adopting the Arduino Shield-style design, ArduTV works with an entire ecosystem of existing embedded boards. It is fully compatible with the Arduino IDE, and the libraries are freely available and ready for integration into your existing projects.

Quickly Display Whatever You Want

You can use ArduTV to output text or simple graphics from your projects on your television (or monitor). This makes ArduTV well-suited for electronics education, making classroom coding demonstrations on a projector or TV super simple. It’s also fantastic for many Arduino users who always wanted to get graphical output without buying yet another LCD—they can quickly convert their code to use any HDMI display, extending potential uses of existing projects.

An excellent illustration of its functionality is this simple snake game, set up with a joystick, and a limited amount of code modification required:

You can even display a Mandelbrot set graph with ArduTV, using the cR, cX, zR, and zX parameters to alter the graph and create new patterns, as seen below.

Project Examples

If you want to see our currently available list of text and graphics commands, check our website for the library. Please note that we expect the commands will be expanded as the project is still being improved. I also have several great examples on my website for you to browse.

Coding Example:

Features & Specifications

Open Source

ArduTV is fully open-source, and both its hardware and firmware files will be available for you to browse for the end of the CrowdSupply campaign on our website.

[Anthony_P]

Hello!

That's awesome! Good job
But I wonder if using an Arduino UNO (I assume you based the developement on this one because of the shape) is really a good thing. Because it's not very powerful compared to others boards such as ESP32.
Did you considere doing this board also for the ESP32?

Also, just asking because I don't really know. What could be the advantages of using an Arduino + your shield; instead of a Raspberry PI for example that contains those functionnalities by default?

[ardutv]

Dear Anthony,

Thanks a lot for the feedback!

I based the project on Arduino UNO because I wanted to expand the possibility to every Arduino project (also the most simple one) to use a monitor or television (or projector); the good think (at least from my POV) is that all the memory and video generation routines are moved into the shield (like a small video card), so the only resources needed from the UNO (or other boards) is one SPI sending a very few bytes to generate texts and graphics. Also the memory is in the shield, so it doesn't need any refresh from the main board (it means that after you draw what you like you don't have to refresh and you can spend resources for other stuff, again, very few bytes needed). Practically, every project based on arduino can be easily modified to use this shield as video output because it almost doesn't consume any resource (much less of most display libraries !).

About ESP32: I though to do the shield as much compatible as possible: it means that all you need to run the shield is a 5V power supply and one SPI (that you can choose to have with 5V or 3.3V)...so the shield is absolutely compatible with ESP32 ! You could use it and if you are an expert user you could help me to build some example project to show it... (you could see other example projects on my website).

About why use arduino and not Raspberry: well, it's a very different hardware and let's say that Arduino is much much simpler and more "HW oriented" (POV), and I think that giving the opportunity to all Arduino users to have an IF to HDMI devices is a great expansion.

Thanks for the feedback again, it's very useful for me !

[gilshultz]

Great Job! From your description and what I found on your web site it can be run with a Pi or any other processor that will interface with the SPI. The only difficult thing I see is the lack of software. It looks like A nice unit and I think it will find lots of homes.

[ardutv]

Thanks Gilshultz, and you are right, it could work with PI and most of the boards.
What do you mean with lack a software ? Maybe I can work to make a sort of library (like I did it for Arduino IDE) for other boards ?
Thanks for feedbacks, community is a great help for me to understand how improve ideas.

[gilshultz]

You are welcome, I am glad I could help. One of these days I will try one of those when I get some free time.

[ardutv]

@gilshulz Just let me know, I’m looking for someone that can help me to build example projects and improve the libraries. Thanks!

[ardutv]

For anyone is interested in I just published in the ArduTV website an example project of use of ArduTV with Nano RP2040 Raspberry PI.

Here the link: https://www.ardutv.com/project-examples/nano-raspberry-rp2040

Thanks for giving me feedback !