FT800 Eve Breakout Board First Impressions & More

[Megahurts]

Hi,

I just wanted to post a message about my first impressions of the MikroE Connect Eve Board I received yesterday.

As usual, it came in a nice protective box that did not seem to have its protection capability tested by any mishandling during shipment.

First thing I noticed was a really cool sticker sheet of self adhesive decals by MikroElektronika for showing off which
compiler language(s) a person prefers, (in different sizes each) and other logos in the supplied printed literature.

Second thing that I noticed right off was how BIG this display is!! Just awesome.

It makes the MMB's look puny by comparison. For those users wanting more real estate for more controls and data displayed
on a single screen layout, you should seriously consider this product and reap the additional benefits of easy sound assignments
for touch panel activity and the graphics possibilities that can not be done with the MMB's.

It looks like it is nearly 3 times the display size area of my PIC32 MMB!

The Eve's landscape height is almost exactly the same as a PIC MMB's landscape width is and its (the Eve's), width is a little over
double of a MMB's height physically.

So more like 2x+ the actual physical size of a MMB, but it sure seems like it is closer to 3x.

Pictures of this HW do not fully give you an idea of how it is in your own hands and before your eyes.
Also as Usual, consistent quality of materials, components, construction and clear silkscreen markings are at MikroE's high standards.

The package contents included a 2x5 and 1x10 set of header pins and set of colored header pin jumper wires for prototyping
quick connections, also
you are required to solder any headers to the board yourself or have it done.

I decided to use socket header connectors instead so the Eve board could be placed on to a MikroE standard 2x5 header on a
development system.
Something to consider when you order one, for your own needs or preference.

I have not powered it up yet though. I am still trying to figure out how I need to have everything configured with SW and HW
to hook it to my MM WorkStation and one of my PIC MMB's MCUs act as host.

It will be interesting to see how well and what level of difficulty, (if possible with V-TFT currently), it is for a PIC32 MMB to use 2 TFT displays
of different makes.

I'm pretty sure there is not an example of that available. Yet.
If (when), I get it figured out, and have time to dress up something to demo a configuration like this, I'll upload to LibStock.

Any suggestions or pointers from any MikroE staff on how to configure 2 TFT controllers (in Basic for my needs), in a V-TFT
projects settings would sure be helpful.
(PIC32 MMB v1.10 - WorkStation V7 - Eve Breakout Board HW Rev. 1.00)

The only things I can think of so far that I see fault with is:

1. Detailed usage, controlling and features descriptions Documentation.
Most of the Important data about the Eve chip and boards advanced capabilities are currently in the FT800 Libraries Help files only.
I think everything in the help file would be more universally beneficial if included as a PDF or in the PDF Users Guide manual and/or mentioning this somewhere about the product.
(the Users manual does not mention that is where you would find its information content either.)
Anyone should be able to have access to that information without needing the FT800 Library installed first.

2.
The first impression I got from the Eve's product launch advertisements, about being able to use less powerful 8-bit MCU's with it,
was I could finally put some PIC 16's and 18's to work that I have in my parts inventory.
But the Eve board as far as I can determine yet, is only 3.3V compliant with its power input/regulation source choice.
There is no choice for power supply voltage levels in this HW Revision for that or Signal Bus communication connections voltage levels.
I would think the Eve Breakout Board would need to be jumper selectable for users choice, to be considered "The Perfect Universal TFT Display" addition Board.
There is plenty of unused space on the Eve's PCB for the required components to make it 5V or 3.3V selectable compliant.
So none of my DIP pin PICs (5V) can be considered for hosting control of the Eve board until I make a level translator interface
or MikroE has one to offer.
I feel the advertised 8-Bit MCU controllable ease implies legacy HW connectivity compliance and that is not the case that I can determine yet.

Being only 3.3V level excludes a lot of MCU HW out there and in stock in a lot of possible customers inventory for possible "new use" before EOL status precludes upgrading MCU replacements to use with the Eve board.

I hope the portable/mobile device drive of late does not cause those in charge to forget entirely of those of us who work with or
design HW of the stationary type with the more universal 5V logic level architecture.

3.
No HW power control on PCB.
I really would like the inclusion of a option to have a manual power on/off switch solder spot on all MMB devices be taken under consideration.

Ship the units with a jumper soldered or a header to be shorted by jumper-bar or leads to a user supplied switch would be nice feature maybe.??

4. No electrical specs for all connections.
For being a piece of electrical HW, surprisingly lacking engineering level technical data like any electrical components datasheet would cover.
There are 2 pin connections on the 1x10 header labeled Audio + and -, but no data as to signal level, loads acceptable or speaker
spec range since I located a micro IC audio amp on the board.
Some example wiring diagrams to all of its connections to a few relevant MCU's and supported external HW in the Users Manual,
like there used to be with MikroE HW, is missing, and missed.

Overall, I think the board is another great addition to MikroE's product line and for many users, the perfect or best choice option
for enhancing a GUI projects design and capabilities.

If it was 5V selectable, I would give it a 4.6 or 5 of 5 Stars possible.
But because my 5V development systems and PICs were not covered to use as hosts, an oversight I hope, and sparsely available technical data details,

I have to give it 2.5 to 3 Stars at present.

I hope consideration is taken to improve the completeness of this HW package so it really shines with the potential it can.

If any of my conclusions are inaccurate as to the limits I stated, please post correction info for all to know about.

Thanks again to MikroE for still an incredible new piece of HW for designing with, Robert.

[janko.kaljevic]

Hello Robert,

Thanks for the evaluation and comments for our new product.
It is vary valuable for us.

Connecting EVE board should be very easy. You only need SPI pins + CS, PD, Vcc and Gnd.
So it should not be any problem. For easy connection on mikroBUS socket you can use following board:
http://www.mikroe.com/click/adapter/
It can help you for simple integration.

Since FT800 uses different lib and pinout from TFT, you can use them both in your project.
But at the moment there is no way to use them simultaneously in same VisualTFT project. You will have to choose which display you want to control.
Only way would be to use VTFT to make screens with FT800 and use TFT lib functions to display on standard screen on MMB.

1. Thanks for the suggestion. We will consider adding more information or documents which will help our users to get started with FT800 very quickly.

2. Yes, you can use it with PIC18F controllers. It will have good performances and you can make some simple GUIs with it.
The only problem is that it requires resources, so on small controllers you will not be able to make screens with large number of components.
At the moment connectEVE is made to use only 3.3V power supply. the reason is to make bigger screen board affordable for everyone.
But if you want to use it on 5V system you will only need voltage translator board in addition.
http://www.mikroe.com/add-on-boards/pow ... ranslator/

3. We have added power switch on our mikromedia + boards. Also we will consider to add same on our other mikromedia boards or new boards.
This is something that has been requested before.

4. Board has on board audio amplifier LM4864, and you can find its datasheet here:
http://www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/lm4864.pdf
In our case we used simple speaker like the one found on SmartMP3 board:
http://www.mikroe.com/add-on-boards/aud ... /smartmp3/

i encourage you to try it and see how it works.
And i am sure that you will find it to be great TFT controller for easy development of GUIs.

Best regards.

[Megahurts]

Thanks for the info posting Janko,

I am sure it will be useful for others too.

I also am sure you guys will do the best you can to correct any short-comings anyone finds and alerts you to.

The 5V to 3.3V solution boards you offer are just what those needing a solution would need to have 5V connectivity.

At the moment connectEVE is made to use only 3.3V power supply. the reason is to make bigger screen board affordable for everyone.

Sorry, but I have to point out the flaw with that statement; the bigger screen board is more affordable to those using (and have already),
3.3V development systems or devices, not so much for users using your 5V development systems and devices and wanting the
same cost to upgrade and enhance their 5V HW. Logic Error!


Being a PCB designer and builder myself, I have used the level translators in a few of my projects so I know the cost is not that
much extra if they were incorporated in the design because there would not be the need to have all of the selectable direction
components (the 5V-3.3V translator uses for maximum config flexibility), needed for the Eve board,
the data directions are fixed and only need HW enough to enable or disable the 5V translation feature.

I guess there would be wasted - unused channels on each translator IC as the Eve's communication to/from host is done serially, not 8-bit wide both directions
that the voltage board you suggested provides.
It is actually over-kill for converting a single SPI buses connections.

2 4-bit translator IC's would be enough for SPI 3.3V-5V converting for the Eve, If there are available devices and cost is good.
I don't know on that, have not looked yet.

I do feel that as long as you have customers actively using your 5V core HW, they should have their needs included in any new HW design that is intended to be marketed as a "Universal" accessory HW.

I understand it is difficult to maintain legacy compliance and costly, but every effort you guys put in to your HW to make it so,
makes us all very happy and thankful we use yours.

Thanks for all that, and providing the links for solutions I described.

Did I mention how awesomely big that Connect Eve Boards Display IS ! ! ! !

Btw, I changed my mind on which header types I wanted to solder on my Eve board from simple female sockets on bottom of
the Eve board to using a cut down pass-thru pin socket header I had on hand still that I got from you guys too.
This gives me sockets on the bottom of the board and header pins on the top for alternate connectivity and test point connections.

Thanks for the encouragements and I'll try later to get the Eve connected for a test run with a PIC32 MMB (onboard TFT not used ATT.), and will pass along config info for a working Eve to MMB on WorkStation HW details, Robert.

[Megahurts]

Greetings all,

Just a quick post to show how different the Eve boards V-TFT components are to the original components for MMB's.

The first image is a screen grab from V-TFT of a projects screen done with original components,
the second image is a screen grab from V-TFT showing the same screen done with the Eve's components and a few legacy components.
(Not fully finished yet also)

dash_screen_v1.jpg (64.99 KiB) Viewed 9373 times

dash_screen_v2.jpg (54.17 KiB) Viewed 9373 times

I think the Eve boards components and larger display will open up many new application ideas and allow things to be done that
could not be done on a MMB due to the need for allowing a users finger to be able to make easy touch selections and display information
that is easy to interpret.

I also want to point out that these screens both were done using 'Buttons' as the method to display changing alpha-numerical data, instead of using the 'Label' components.

************************************************************************
Here is a tip for those of you that do use a 'Label' or 'Button' to display changing numerical data.
The 'Caption' property of any object is declared as a string variable, and as such, number values held in a numerical variable type require conversion
to a string variable type before you can assign them to the caption property of an object.
(In Basic) there are library routines to do this called BytetoStr(), WordtoStr() and so on for all of the different numerical types.
The problem with just using only those conversion routines is that they Right-Justify the result and pad leading spaces if the length (number of digits),
of the number converted is less than the declared length of the temp string variable or max length property setting for the Component.

This causes the horizontal positioning of the numbers to change left and right more than you might have wanted when you designed
your layout in V-TFT, like having numbers displayed after or in the middle of some text, and the running application does not look
like you set it in V-TFT when you placed the objects on the editing screen layout.

To solve this, there is another library and routine in it you need to include in your project that will strip leading spaces from a string
variable you give it.
(In Basic), it is the String Library and the routine is called "ltrim(String)".

If you are having issues with displaying numbers on a MMB like you wanted or expected, give this a try if not already doing so.
In V-TFT, the FT800 Eve devices have a dedicated numerical label that seems to handle direct passing of numerical values to it
without the need to do conversions to a string type first, so the need for the string manipulation routines will depend on what you
are trying to do.
(For an example of code using the string conversions and space stripping, (in V-TFT and mBASIC Pro for PIC32), look at the
"Buttons as a Label" forum thread I did or go to Libstock and download the example project to see the coding in the events file.)

I still have to do the number-to-string space stripping method in the project conversion to Eve HW I am working on because I
only used the Eve's Number Label component to put the 0 and 50 on the speedometer, everywhere else I used the Eve versions
of V-TFT Buttons and doing this is still needed to keep the display looking like I wanted.
****************************************************************************

I'm having a lot of fun converting the project over to the Eve board and seeing what Eve objects can do to make things better for displaying and easier touch interactions.
Of course, the layout(s) are always subject to changes after seeing them actually on a running device.


Laters, Robert.

[Megahurts]

Hello any staff member,

Quick important Question about Connect Eve Boards SPI connections:

I'm trying to configure V-TFT's project settings on the TFT tab for the Eve and realized the Eve board does not have a Reset Line (RST).

Janko posted this above, but I did not pay much attention to it because the wiring of the connections was my least concern, the software configurations is the hardest part with this setup I'm trying.

Connecting EVE board should be very easy. You only need SPI pins + CS, PD, Vcc and Gnd.

The Question: Are we to substitute the Eve's PD (Power Down), connection for the RST setting in V-TFT for the TFT setup and Eve-TFT Init routines in the compilers?
(I guess, for every MCU - Eve SPI connections and configurations?)

This is why I asked in the first post for any guidance on settings for using V-TFT with Eve connected to a PIC32 MMB in the mmWorkStation board.
If there is a hardware pattern preset in V-TFT for the FT800 and PIC32 MCU (on the MMB) I could or should reference, which
one would best get me going so I can get to testing the Eve Board?

There are a lot of new settings with the FT800 and for my situation, NO examples for the HW I have to use.

Hope to get an answer quickly on this, for me and anybody else going to try the Eve with the WorkStation.
IF I get lucky and successful before a reply is made, I'll pass the information along, Robert.

[Megahurts]

Hi

Still waiting for any info btw.

In the meantime, some more irritating flaws spotted with Eve documentation.

1st:
The documentation for the FT800 Eve Hardware is spread out between being in the FT800 library help file and V-TFT's help file and
the preliminary datasheet document from FTDI for the FT800 EVE chip.
None of which seem to be complete. I guess MikroE can not put out a complete reference until the manufacture of the chip does,
so no blame can go to MikroE for any information that is not even available, but I wish MikroE had taken the time to consolidate
all FT800 information that is available in to one document.

2nd.
The Eve products "User Manual" is not a user manual, I have to say it is a product features sales brochure at best.
Please put the person in charge of product technical documentation back in marketing where they should excel.

Seriously though, while the documentation of late is pretty and has lots of pictures, they are starting to lack the detailed information
we actually need in order to use the products.
Friendly advice: Get back to your roots, and provide us with serious tools that do not need to be 'dressed up' to sell or function.
Wasting your money on printing and paying whoever to design these pretty brochures that lack the technical details because putting it in
would cover up a pretty picture of a product close-up.

3rd.
The above opinions are the result of my spending a couple of days searching everywhere for the correct SPI connection data.
The results are confusing, contradicting and missing plain accurate usable information.
The FT800 EVE chip does not have a SPI line for RST (Reset), instead it has a line called PD (Power Down) and not even FTDI's chip datasheet
clearly explains how it should be manipulated for use in SPI comunications.
But V-TFT still has configuration requirements for RST Port-Pin assignments, not anything about a PD line.
There was not even a printed addendum with device covering this or any recommended starting settings for the TF800 configurations, which are many.

There needs to be something in the documents for each supported MCU family that users can reference to get started with.

Done trying to figure it out for now, going on vacation and try to forget the last couple of days, Bye.

[janko.kaljevic]

Hello,

Thanks for the suggestion.
We will consider to make a single detailed document regarding FT800 and working with it in VTFT and FT800 library.
This documentation should cover most of the functionality of the FT800 and it stating with FT800 should be easier.

Best regards.

[Megahurts]

Thank you a bunch Janko,

Just a quick update on Eve + WorkStation configuration;

I got the help needed to correctly connect the Eve Breakout Board to my mmWorkStation and Initialization
settings for a custom HW profile that works from Janko and while this is a usage of hardware that was not really expected,
it is possible and works like it was.

I will pass on the details about this setup soon, so anyone wanting to try it also, can do so. Working on a quick Example to include with it so first test will be easy for those who try it.

Thanks again Janko for the help (and Marko too), Robert.

[davide69]

Received my FT800 connect EVE without a library manual, what should I do now? After traying some example is laying on my desk. Another product without documentation?
Where can I find information how to use library command?

Help appreciated.

Regards

Davide

[Toley]

Hi Davide,

I believe you have to download the library from Libstock and install it for your favorite compiler. There is surely a help file inside.
http://www.libstock.com/projects/view/583/ft800-library

[filip]

Hi,

The FT800 Library includes the Help file with the description of the FT800 library and its functions.

Regards,
Filip.

[davide69]

How to draw a sine wave on this display?

[filip]

Hi,

You can do this by writing dots on the display which represent the sine wave.

Regards,
Filip.

[davide69]

Hello Filip,
dots and not line? is dot a compoment of Ft800? I do not find any information or example about it. All example in the library is empty. Am I doing something wrong?
Please try to expalin how we can draw a lines passing for several points, or please add some real example, we learn by example, so please !!!

[filip]

Hi,

Yes, the dot is the component of the FT800 library.
There is a FT800_Screen_Dot function that draws dots on the screen.

The point is that you calculate the sine wave magnitudes in high resolution to make a sine wave appear on the screen.
As you mentioned, you can use line component for this also - draw lines from current point to the next point.

Regards,
Filip.