So, I’ve been meaning to share this little project I got myself into. I called it the “SPI Golf Course,” not ’cause it’s anything like, you know, a real golf course with grass and clubs. Nah, it’s more about the journey, the uphill battle, kinda like trying to get a good score on a windy day out on the links.
How It All Kicked Off
It started a while back. I was feeling a bit stuck, you know? My regular work had become a bit too much… paperwork, meetings, the usual grind. I needed something to tinker with, something to get my hands dirty, something that wasn’t about deadlines or pleasing someone else. I’ve always had a soft spot for taking things apart and figuring them out, even if I don’t always put them back together right the first time.
I remembered I had this old box of electronic bits and bobs I’d collected over the years. Little screens, some microcontroller boards I bought on a whim, sensors that probably weren’t even made anymore. Most of it was just gathering dust. I thought, why not try and make something? Anything, really. Just to prove to myself I still could.
Diving into the “SPI” Part
I picked out a small graphical display. Looked cool. Flipped it over, saw it needed an SPI interface to talk to it. Now, I’d heard of SPI – Serial Peripheral Interface, if you wanna get fancy, but who does? – but I hadn’t properly wrestled with it in ages. It’s one of those things, sounds simple enough, just a few wires, but the devil’s always in the details.
So, the first step was just getting that darn screen to light up. I grabbed an old microcontroller board I had lying around – nothing fancy, just a basic one. I started wiring things up. This was where the “golf course” analogy really started to hit home. Each connection, each line of code, felt like a tricky shot.
- Figuring out which pin was MOSI, MISO, SCLK, and CS (Chip Select). That itself was a bit of a treasure hunt with the datasheets I could find, which were, let’s say, not the clearest.
- Writing the initial code. Just to send a simple command to wake the screen up.
- Then, the inevitable: it didn’t work. Of course, it didn’t.
I must have spent a whole evening just staring at a blank screen. Re-checked wires, re-read the datasheets (or what I thought were the right ones). I was close to just tossing the whole thing in the bin. You know that feeling? When you’re sure you’ve done everything right, but it still laughs in your face.
The Breakthrough (Finally!)
Then, I stumbled upon some old forum post. Some other poor soul had a similar issue with a similar cheap screen. Turns out, the initialization sequence was super finicky. A tiny change in the commands, and boom! The screen flickered. It actually showed some garbage pixels at first, but then, after a bit more tweaking, I got it to display a “Hello.” Man, that felt good. Like sinking a long putt after duffing the last three shots.
Once the screen was talking, I thought, “Okay, what now?” I needed a challenge, a “hole” to play on this SPI course. I decided to make a simple game. Something interactive. I found a rotary encoder – you know, one of those knobs you can turn. Hooked that up. Then the challenge was to read the knob’s position and get that information displayed on my SPI screen in a somewhat responsive way.
This involved more fiddling with code:
- Reading the encoder (thankfully, not SPI for this part, a bit easier).
- Mapping the encoder values to something meaningful on the screen.
- Updating the screen quickly enough so it didn’t look like a slideshow. SPI can be fast, but you still gotta push the pixels correctly.
The “Golf Course” Game Itself
The “game” ended up being a very simple thing. A little dot would move across the screen, and you had to turn the knob to position a paddle to “hit” it. Super basic. But getting it all to work together, the input from the knob, the logic in the microcontroller, and the output to the SPI display – that was the real project. Each part was like a different club I had to learn to use.
I spent a good few weekends on it. Lots of trial and error. Lots of moments where I’d fix one thing and break two others. Classic tinkering. But when it finally came together, and I could actually play my silly little game on this thing I’d wired up from scratch, it was pretty satisfying.
So, that’s the story of my “SPI Golf Course.” It’s not a product, it’s not going to win any awards. It was just a personal challenge, a way to mess with some hardware and code, and to remind myself that sometimes, the process of figuring things out, one frustrating step at a time, can be its own reward. And yeah, SPI can be a beast, but like a tough golf course, once you’ve played a round, you learn a lot.
