First light: the LED board and the Android TV app both work
Two firsts in one day. The LED board put real cards on its panel for the first time, and the Android TV app ran on a real Google TV stick. Neither one was perfect on the first try, but both work.
The LED board
The panel arrived this morning, and by tonight it was showing my collection with the ticker scrolling along the bottom.
It took a few detours to get there.
The panel wasn't wired the way I expected. A panel with 64 rows normally needs five address lines, and my plan was to solder a jumper on the MatrixPortal to add the fifth one. Once I checked the panel with a meter, it turned out this one only uses three, with different row chips that take the rows in a different way. The pin where the extra lines normally go is wired to ground on this panel. So the jumper stays open, and soldering it would have been a mistake.
The usual library couldn't drive it. Adafruit's own panel library only knows the standard wiring, so the board now uses a different open source library that supports this kind of panel.
Finding the right settings took two rounds of testing. I wrote a small test program that cycles through different settings at the press of a button and draws numbered stripes, corners, text, and checkerboards. The first round got the rows right, but a patch of text on the right half still had stray dots. The second round tried different timing on the data clock, and one setting came out clean across the whole panel. I checked a full size photo pixel by pixel to be sure every column lined up.
Then the real firmware. The new version with the panel drawing went to the board over Wi-Fi, the same way every update does, and it came up showing collection mode with the ticker. That answered the question I was most worried about: the library warns that its panel driver can interfere with Wi-Fi on this board. On mine it doesn't. A batch of 40 pages downloads in about 8 and a half seconds with the panel running, close to the 7.4 seconds it took with no panel at all.
One more bug. When I switched my account to prices, the board kept trying and never finished. With 450 cards, the price ticker was wider than the memory the board had to hold it. Now the server sends the board a ticker of up to about 9 minutes of scrolling, and if the ticker ever can't load, the pages show without it instead of waiting.
For now it runs from USB-C power, so brightness is held to half. A real 5 volt supply comes next.
The Android TV app
The Android TV app was written before I had any Android tools on my Mac. Tonight was the first build, and it compiled without changing a line of the app itself. Only the build tools needed newer versions.
Then it went onto an onn. 4K Google TV stick over Wi-Fi, and it works. It pairs with a code like the Apple TV app and shows the wall.
The ticker might be a little choppy on the stick. I'm keeping an eye on it before I change anything, since a budget streaming stick is exactly what a lot of you will run it on.
What's next
- The LED board: a proper 5 volt power supply so it can run brighter, a firmware update that's built and waiting, and then the real tests: how card art looks at 128 by 64, and how readable it is from across a room.
- Android TV: checking every page type against the Apple TV app side by side, smoothing out the ticker if it needs it, and the first test on a Fire TV stick.
Still no date on either one. I'd rather they be right than early.
If you want to try them first, beta testers get them before anyone else. Watch the Discord, or request an invite if you're not in yet.