This lesson represents one of the many subjective decisions that gets made in a software project. This lesson could have been lesson 4 or 6 without changing the final product. Keep that in mind: there are many paths to the same end goal. 

/* * It's time to start making the character look more like a game character. * As mentioned before, programming is a process of adding layers of * features to get what you want. Thinking that way,you could fully * develop the mechanisms for moving a character into the game and then * later add on the graphical parts. * * It's best to approach everything in stages so that 'going back' to add * in something doesn't force you to re-write all the other code which * failed to account for some change. * * This is not a perfect process and planning a software project is hard! * Pick a feature, break it into tiny bits, then solve each bit and see * where the errors pop up. */ /* * Here, you'll create a custom character for the screen which will look * like a little person and learn how display it with LCD.write() */ #include "MakerScreenXVI.h" MakerScreenXVI lcd; /* * To make a custom character, you need to be able to tell the screen * what to draw. You do this with a new type of variable, an array. * An array is a variable which holds more than one number in a list * or grid. */ /* * Below is an array named man. It contains bytes, so it's a 'byte' type * array. The [8] means there are 8 bytes in the array. 8 is the number * of pixels tall a custom character can be. * * The purpose of this variable is to set which pixels are 'on' and * which should be 'off' in the custom character. LCD characters are 8X5 * pixel arrays.If you look at the 1s and 0s below, you will see that they * fit that pattern. Any place there are 1s, the pixel will be dark. * * The 0b in front of the 0s and 1s tells the computer that the digits it * is about to receive are binary. You always need those there for a * custom character. * * To visualize how this works, you can play with this website: * */ byte man[8] = { 0b00000, 0b01100, 0b01100, 0b01100, 0b01110, 0b01100, 0b01010, 0b01010 }; void setup() { lcd.begin(); lcd.backlightOn(); /* * Use the .createChar() method to tell the LCD to make a new * character. There are 8 empty 'slots' on the LCD for custom * characters, which will be indexed by a number 0-7. */ lcd.createChar(0, man); //char named man in slot 0 /* * The first argument, 0, is the 'slot' number and you'll use '0' to * refer to this custom character later. The second is the name of the * array specifying the pixels for the character, as created above. */ } void loop() { lcd.clear(); /* * Displaying a custom character is different from the previous text and * variable displays. You tell the screen which custom graphic to draw, * which you do with the 'slot' number assigned above around line 72 */ lcd.write(byte(0));//write custom char 0 (man) to the screen /* * You are using a different method to put up the custom character: * .write(), not .print(). The 'byte' wrapped around the 0 is an * artifact of much deeper parts of the C++ coding language. * Just note that it needs to be there. */ delay(100);//Delay reduces flicker of the character } /* * In this lesson, you learned how to create a new character, so that * you can make graphics for your game. Next, you'll see how to * use custom characters to make the animation for the game. * * Before moving on, notice that the .write() command has the word 'byte' before * the custom character's number. Without going too deep into things relating * to libraries, try the program with just lcd.write(0), to see how it works * without the word byte. This is unique to 0. */ // (c) 2017 Let's Start Coding. License:

Some of this program looks much more complicated than it actually is: The byte array is just a 'drawing' of the character you create. Don't forget that lcd.write() is different than lcd.print() - those methods sound similar but have very different effects.