Really starting to hate these SainSmart products … saying their support is bad would be an insult to those companies whose support is actually bad. Theirs is below worse. But also, their products are more something that’s done half-ass and not complete, or never checked for problems. There’s no proper documentation, not to mention that they are using someone else’s free library for their commercial gain (and claim it as their own.) The TFT shield I have has a jumper to make the backlight PWM controlled, but when you enable that, the touch module stops working. It’s not worth my time and effort to trace and figure out why, I’ll just build a proper shield and call it done. Such a shame, they could be making much better products for the same cost …
That’s a bummer. The Nuclear Dream project at this year’s burn are using a SainSmart relay shield to control their flame effects (I helped them with the button debounce sketch), I hope it works out ok.
I’m finding more problems with the shield … I can’t tap into the SPI pins because that too will cause the touch controller to quit. So I’m having to use different pins and bit-bang SPI on them which sucks big balls. I’m just going to make my own custom shield once I’m done prototyping this project. Screw the shield.
This is the third time in three days that I have read someone say their products suck.
I bought one of their Melzi boards and it was OK, so I suggested it as a simple alternative for a cheapo CNC router - and was shot down in flames by a bunch of people they have stiffed, so I think that, despite my Melzi board going OK, I will be avoiding them in the future.
I can’t see a TFT shield among their offerings, but everything I have bought from Baite has been rock-solid - so much so I just bought another 50 Nano’s from them. (at 30% off - about $3.40, shipped, for a Nano v.3.0 is nothing to sneeze at!).
http://www.aliexpress.com/store/812021/search?SearchText=shield
Sorry - the link was to show a prototyping shield they have that my Dad says is good.
The thing is, I can make it work, I just have to ditch their crappy shield which isn’t a big deal as I was using the TFT without it at first. I just thought the shield would help during development so I didn’t have to have multiple breadboards with a million wires everywhere. Turns out, while it works, it’s only marginal and is causing more problems than anything else. So I’m going to revert back to my breadboard setup. The other, more serious issue here is that they are releasing the UTFT and UTouch libraries for their products as if it’s theirs. Both libraries are FREE and can be downloaded from the author’s web site, however SainSmart does not freely distribute it when the license clearly allows it to. Consequently, anyone who tries to contact the actual author of the libraries will not get any help what so ever from him, understandably so. SainSmart essentially stole his library, made some changes, and is now releasing it with their commercial products. To me that’s a bigger reason to quit buying their products than anything else.