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I’m not sure what is wrong, other than the wiring is not right. I assume you are using a Seeedstudio Mega and not some other Mega board. Have you tried the VE on an Arduino Uno?
OK, good to hear. When it comes to FTDI cables and adapters, it really does pay to use more expensive, official devices. Cheap stuff fails a lot.
Yes, that could certainly cause a problem. The voltage is not high enough to register with the 5V logic on the ATmega328 microcontroller.
You could also check the soldering connections to make sure the RX and TX pins on the header are connected to the microcontroller. See this image for the traces:
http://nootropicdesign.com/matrixbackpack/design.htmlYour wiring sounds right. If the board is running, then the Uno bootloader is definitely there. And it sounds like the reset is working. It must be an issue with the cable or your driver. I use a Mac, though, and have no issues.
In my experience, when it comes to FTDI cables, the cheap ones are no good. I have experienced 50% failure rate when sourcing cheap or “oddball” ones (wrong pinouts!). This is why I ONLY sell genuine FTDI manufactured cables or adapters that I know work (e.g. the Adafruit FTDI friend). There are many counterfeit FTDI chips in the world, and they are installed in cheap cables.
The instructions for the library dependencies are clearly described on the games page:
http://nootropicdesign.com/hackvision/games.htmlThere are links to the libraries.
The button pins are printed on the silkscreen:
https://nootropicdesign.com/hackvision/design.htmlYou should be able to connect multiple strips to be driven by the same data pin, but I have not tried more than 2. I do not know if you will have difficulties with 14, so I think you need to try it and see how many can work.
Distance between the board and LEDs should be minimized, but I typically have a 1 meter wire distance to my LEDs without problems. That is only one strip, though.The Video Experimenter will not work with any Arduino that does not have an ATmega328 chip. It only works on Uno or Duemilanove.
I was able to get it to work on the Seeeduino Mega: http://nootropicdesign.com/projectlab/2011/07/13/ve-on-the-seeeduino-mega/
The TVout library documentation is here:
https://code.google.com/archive/p/arduino-tvout/But it’s not very useful. You can see the API drawing primitives by looking at the header file TVout.h. It’s simple to use.
The enhancements for the Video Experimenter are documented on the product page:
http://nootropicdesign.com/ve/It can only do about 5-10 frames per second. I’m not sure which program you are referring to when you ask about the delay. There are many example programs for the VE. The Overlay example has a delay to give you time to actually see the output before erasing it again to capture a new frame.
The TVout library resolution only affects the resolution of the overlay. The resolution of the input signal is unaffected.
The memory limitations prevent you from storing more than one frame in memory. And the primitive nature of the Arduino limits the output to monochrome. Sorry!
That sounds strange but I can’t imagine that it has anything to do with the backpack hardware. The ATmega328 chip has the same Uno bootloader as any Uno-compatible Arduino.
Are you certain that your FTDI cable is genuine and not one of the cheap clones that Sparkfun sells? I quit buying them from Sparkfun because they had a 50% failure rate and Sparkfun refused to believe that was a bad thing.
