This device provides easy and clean connection to a VGA monitor and PS/2 Keyboard.

This removes external electronics and hanging wires from arduino projects with a monitor and/or keyboard, as well as provides a very simple and effective API for drawing to the monitor. A dedicated graphics processor frees up the main processor for other tasks.

What is it?

The NGT31 renders graphics, provides a keyboard port, and it has various advanced rendering functions to make your code run efficiently. The API is easy to use, and utility classes are provided so that the more advanced features can be used easily. This shield only uses two Arduino pins, which can be selected using jumpers on the board.

It is for the simple assembly of a project with keyboard input and VGA output with only four components: - Keyboard - Monitor - Arduino - NGT31

It is designed to be sleek, sturdy, and simple.

What does it/can it do?

At the very basic, it can render text and graphics in color on a VGA monitor, and add a PS2 keyboard connector to your Arduino. It offloads all of the heavy lifting usually involved in video, including video output, graphics, drawing, etc. This frees up the Arduino to do other things.

The NGT31 graphics & keyboard shield provides several advanced rendering functions. Sprites can be drawn very efficiently, and there are functions for 3D drawing. Large numbers of 3D coordinates and operations can be saved to the shield, and then later be executed in a single call. This includes drawing lines, points, and sprites in 3D space. Many basic rendering functions are, of course, supported.

There aren’t many pin restrictions. The GPU uses only two arduino pins. And, each pin can be selected to avoid pin conflicts.

It automatically scrolls down when text is rendered beyond the bottom of the screen.

Easy Hello World:

Here is a simple Hello World program which will additionally display the card software/hardware version on the screen.

#include 
NMT_GFX ngt;

void setup() {
  ngt.begin(11, 10);
  ngt.print("Hello!\nThis is an arduino writing\non screen with a ");

      // send the card version back to the shield and print it on the screen.
  ngt.println(ngt.get_card_ver());
}

void loop() {
      // Nothing to do here
    }

Technical Specs

• Ardduino communication via 115200 baud UART port
• A dedicated processor core for each of the video, 2d rendering, and 3d rendering tasks
• 288x256 pixel resolution VGA output
• NES-like color system
• built-in font, cursor, and automatic vertical scrolling
• supports user made sprites and 3d lines ( located in up to 2KB of VRAM )
• PS2 Keyboard port
• uses 32-bit 8-core 80MHz Parallax Propeller 1 microcontroller for rendering