Arduboy – Open Source Card-Sized Gaming Board | Hacker News Reader

Arduboy – Open Source Card-Sized Gaming Board

seeedstudio.com

71 pointsrootlocus25 comments

I have one of these, they're very neat! Form factor is great, buttons feel good, build quality is solid. I bought a second one as a gift.

At the time it first released it didn't integrate easily into the Arduino environment, but I checked and it's now in the Library Manager. Include "arduboy.h" and set board type to Leonardo, and you're all set.

Edit: link to project homepage: www.arduboy.com

What's the battery life like?

Article claims 8 hours.

Title link should be changed to that page. That seeed site is shady. They started the price $10 above the asking price to give the illusion you'll save money if enough people buy it. BS and gimmickry.

It's sort of a shame this is built around an Atmega chip as opposed to an ARM Cortex M0 like in the Teensy. I guess it doesn't need much horsepower for a 128x64 monochrome display, but it wouldn't have been much more expensive to put a much more powerful CPU in it. E.g., if you want to maintain a framebuffer, there goes 40% of your RAM.

I had the same thought. At this point, those 8-bit computers are really not worth it unless you are using the really tiny form factors and size is a major concern.

Seemingly the whole point is to be accesible and simple by being arduino compatible. It has also already sold and shipped $400k+ worth.

The Teensy is source-level compatible with the arduino, so it would have pretty much the same level of accessibility.

I really wish there was hardware of a similar form factor that ran Pico 8. The Pocket CHIP is a start, but it's a more general-purpose machine with Pico 8 support.

Pico 8 is based on Lua, so a relatively powerful CPU and lots of RAM are needed to run it.

Hmm, you can get eLua which runs on microcontrollers, I wonder how you would handle the graphics though.

Should be getting the Pocket CHIP in a couple of weeks. Already developing a game for it. The Pico-8 flavor of Lua is a dream to program for. It hasn't been this easy to develop games since Flash for me.

I was just thinking that this is tantalizingly similar to, but not quite the same as, PICO-8 on on a Pocket CHIP. It seems a shame to split such an interesting market like this. Pocket CHIP has the advantage of letting you code right on the device, of course, but how much value does that really have? Even on PC, some devs prefer to use a separate text editor rather than deal with text at PICO-8's resolution, and the dinky keyboard doesn't help.

Some pins would be nice. I honestly don't care about gaming on an arduino, but something to quickly build a gui for an arduino project would be nice.

Preferably: a GUI to select which project to boot and a single cable for all pins to plug to an expansion board with the actual hardware project. This way you could use one arduboy for all your projects (given you need just one at a time)

In the video, the author claims to be part of a hardware accelerator in China called HAX (https://hax.co/accelerator/).

Any other information on this? I find it interesting on their website that the conclusion of the accelerator is to get a successful crowd funded project...

Several (well, at least one) YC hardware companies have gone through HAX. They also do a demo day of sorts at SF Maker Faire, Arduboy was there last year.

Put wireless/bluetooth in it. I could program it to control a variety of IoT devices around my house.

I'd love to write a CHIP-8 emulator for this. It has the perfect screen resolution.

How does one pre-order something that ships in August 2016... Is it shipping now?

"Will be shipped on Sep 20th."

I don't see anything about pre-orders or August anywhere on the page (did the link get changed?). This is a group buy, where you commit to purchasing something at a certain price, but if enough people also join, the price can come down for everybody because of bulk discounts. So right now you can commit to paying $39.95, and if 40 more (as of this comment) people join the price drops to the final tier of $37.95 for anyone involved in the group buy.

I ordered in May and I'm still waiting for mine, so make of that what you will.

How do you think it compares to the Chip ?

Arduboy: 16MHz AVR microcontroller, 32KB flash, 1KB EEPROM, 2.5KB SRAM, 6 buttons, 128x64 display.

CHIP: 1GHz ARM Cortex-R8 CPU, 512MB RAM, 4GB onboard flash, 802.11bgn+bluetooth 4.0, composite video output.

They're very different computers.

CHIP is a plain old Debian box. Arduboy is an Arduino.

Beware of autoplay video!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com