Monday, April 21, 2014

2048, Embedded

Let me first get something out of the way... I am an embedded nut. I absolutely love taking a foreign piece of hardware and bringing it to life. My most recent excursion into embedded land has been with a Nucleo board designed by STMicroelectronics.

I decided to pair this board with a Gameduino 2 shield designed for the popular Arduino. I wrote a driver for the FT800 graphics processor and implemented Gabriele Cirulli's 2048 game as a first project with this hardware.

2048 Screenshot
The result is an awesome device that emulates the fun 2048 browser game (pretty closely, anyway). It will make a great desk ornament for passersby at work to gawk at.

Nucleo F4 Board
In this article I will give you a demonstration of the game and take you through some of the design concepts I have used to come up with this product. I wrote my own linker script, C-Runtime and driver library for this project and it was an awesome experience.