Monthly Archives: August 2012

JOS – Updated!!!

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I did it, I finally found some down time to update JOS to work with current libraries from Adafruit. Below is a link to the new code on Github. A few notes to look at are listed below.

First, this is code for the Touch Shield, but it can easily be changed to the breakout board, and don’t forget to uncomment the ‘#define USE_ADAFRUIT_SHIELD_PINOUT’ line in Adafruit_TFTLCD.h file.

Also, this sketch has pin 3 setup as the backlight on the shield. This way you have PWM control over the backlight. You can accomplish this by cutting the VCC trace and soldering the PIN3 jumper on the back of the shield. You can read more on how to do that here.

This sketch has EEPROM settings, if you have not used them before, the values will be zero and need to be set. There are notes about this in the sketch on lines 92 & 93.

If you don’t know what JOS is, you can check it out here. (What’s a JOS anyway?)

Happy sketching! The code is here: https://github.com/jersagfast/JOS—TFT-Menu-System

Programming the Square Inch – TQFP Jig

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First, I am happy to announce that the One Square Inch of Goodness and the FTDI Adapter are in the stock now and available for purchase!

In the video above, I show how I programmed the assembled kits as well as the raw TQFP IC’s without soldering anything to them. It’s a pretty simple setup, but solved the problem I was facing as well as made things a lot faster. As I mentioned in the video, pogo pins are found here, USBtinyISP here, and breadboard switch here (from Adafruit).

A note on using ICSP: – The Square Inch is designed to accept an FTDI connection for programming. Because of this, a .1µF capacitor is between the reset line of the ATmega328P and the pin labeled DTR. This is so when you load new sketches on the Square Inch, it will reset automatically via the DTR line on the FTDI adapter. When you use ICSP, you need to bypass this capacitor! Otherwise it will not work. The programming board I used in the video had the capacitor bypassed with solder (pictured below). There is also a via to the right of the capacitor that leads to the reset line. This can be shorted to the DTR pin to accomplish the same task, as I did to program the assembled boards.  Continue reading →