Arduino: Game Pack

So the Game Pack arrived and I quickly put it together. Here is a video showing you how to connect it all together:

The TouchShield came pre-programmed with some kind of drawing application so you can play around with it straight out of the box, which was a nice touch.

When you program an Arduino, you are really programming the Atmel AVR mico controller embedded on the board. When you upload a sketch to the Arduino the program is written to the flash memory of the AVR chip. When power is supplied to the board a boot loader then runs your program. The chip will then interact with all your input/output devices you have plugged in to the pins on the board. The chip on the Arduino Uno is an ATmega328P.

Similarly the TouchShield Slide also contains an AVR micro controller that you program in much the same way as the one on the Arduino board. This chip is an ATmega2560. The ATmega2560 has much more flash memory than the 328P so you can write more complex programs for it. This is required as graphics processing and game logic is not as trivial as making an LED blink.