There are a few settings you can change

Loop Time & Brightness

First is how long to display a GIF, second is how bright the backlight is. We can display multiple images, by default waiting 10 seconds until continuing to the next one. You can change this by creating or replacing a text file called arcada_config.json in the root directory of the QSPI flash or SD card. If you have the Arcada board plugged in and press reset, it will appear in the filesystem for you to access

Here's an example of the contents of the file you can use

    {"volume":255,"brightness":255,"seconds_per_gif":5}
  

volume is not used in this project. brightness ranges from 0 (display off) to 255 (all the way max brightness). seconds_per_gif is what you expect

And here's where it resides, remember its not in the gifs folder! Place it in the 'root' directory

When you're done, be sure to Eject the disk - it wont disappear but it will flush/save your config data so it doesn't get corrupted

Storage Locations

Of course you want to change the built in GIFs! You can store GIFs in one of two places - either an SD card you insert OR on the internal QSPI Flash

You cannot pick or choose in one compiled version due to some unavoidable constraints on how Arduino handles Files - so you have to pick one!

By default we use QSPI, because almost all our boards have it built in for free.

However, if you'd like to use SD cards for storage, go to the Adafruit_Arcada library and look in Adafruit_Arcada.h for a section starting with #elif defined(ADAFRUIT_PYPORTAL)

Find the lines within that section that look like:

#define ARCADA_USE_QSPI_FS
//#define ARCADA_USE_SD_FS

And change it to

//#define ARCADA_USE_QSPI_FS
#define ARCADA_USE_SD_FS

Then save and re-upload

Displaying GIFs from SD cards is easier to move big files on and off the device because you can use an SD card reader, but they will display slower than when stored on the QSPI internal memory! That's because QSPI is a much faster storage system, we can read the data a few seconds faster!

This guide was first published on Mar 20, 2019. It was last updated on Mar 20, 2019.

This page (Customization) was last updated on Mar 19, 2019.

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