When you’re pushing your Arduino to render graphics, the hardware side of things can get pretty messy. Building the keyboard interface and TVout on a breadboard is a potential solution, but you can run into problems like loose connections and data problems from breadboard capacitance. Dylan Brophy of the Nuclaer Tech store on Tindie has this problem licked.
The NGT30 is an Arduino Desktop Shield that circumvents many of these problems to streamline your development process. It has a keyboard port, VGA output, and advanced rendering functions to ensure a high FPS for your games or other graphics needs. The Propeller chip on the shield takes the heavy lifting off of the Arduino.
It’s capable of rendering basic text and color graphics to a VGA monitor, but it can also make 3D lines for rendering meshes, and you can store sprites for quick rendering later.
The GPU only uses two Arduino pins. Each pin can be selected to avoid conflicts. It’s a simple and elegant solution to a complex hardware problem. If you want to follow along with development, check out the details of the project over on Hackaday.io.
