Tellymate Video Shield

Easy TV Output From Your Arduino With Retro Video Game Fonts. Imported From The United Kingdom.

• PAL or NTSC Composite Video Output (AV)
• Comes with AV Cable
• Stackable Shield
• Serial output
• 38x25 characters
• Black and White
• Simple Graphics
• Double width / height text
• Simple control codes

TV out from your Arduino.

This shield has the same core circuit as the standard TellyMate, but re-arranged as an Arduino Shield. It listens to the Arduino's TX pin (Digital pin 1). Just plug it into your Arduino and use Serial.println() commands to output text onto your telly!

It's really simple to use... Here's some code to display "Hello!" on the TV;

Serial.begin(57600); //57k6 baud
Serial.println("Hello!");

Further demonstrations (including screenshots), are available from the 'examples' page.

The TellyMate Shield is stackable. Care has been taken to ensure that no components extend beyond the female headers on the top of the board, meaning that other shields can be connected above. In particular, the bulky phono socket on the original circuit has been replaced by a 3.5mm jack socket (a suitable cable is included).

An extension reset button is provided to duplicate the (covered) reset button on the underlying Arduino.

New features:

The TellyMate Shield can now return data back to the Arduino (see the User Guide for details)
Professionally made PCB
Straight-through 'stacking' headers - The new board is no longer 'offset'

Selecting Fontbanks

For TellyMates with more than one fontbank, each row of the display can be set to use a particular fontbank.

See the _ sequence on the Control Sequences page.

Reprogramming Fontbanks

From firmware 1.0.14, fontbanks (including fontbank 0) can be reprogrammed via software.

Reprogrammable fontbanks mean that you can re-design the characters that are shown on the screen. With careful use, this opens up lots of possibilities, including graphical work.

Technical details of the control sequences (and data setup) required to program a fontbank are given under the R sequence on the Control Sequences page.

To save you having to wade through all the technical details, an Arduino sketch has been written that will program a fontbank for you. It needs a set of comma separated data to work from. You can either get this data from a fontX.h file in the latest TellyMate source-code on Batsocks, or generate your own using a specially crafted google spreadsheet for TellyMate font design. The spreadsheet creates the data required in the second workbook (see the tabs at the bottom of the spreadsheet).

Links

TellyMate User's Guide