Watching back a slideshow of some of your favorite times of the past years is a great way to reflect on what’s happened and get excited for the future. The Electronic Cats crew wanted to incorporate this concept into a more simplified, interactive form which resulted in the Garrita project.

Garrita is a homemade platform that lets an Arduino GIGA R1 WiFi with GIGA Display Shield transform into a highly mobile slideshow thanks to its larger onboard memory capacity and convenient layout. This year, the Electronic Cats were able to take their image shifter concept even further with Michi: an existing project that turns any conductive object into a capacitive touch-sensing controller. Whenever one of Michi’s inputs are toggled, the board sends a signal to the GIGA R1 WiFi that causes the current slide to advance to the next one.

In order to go from a locally stored image to something on the Display Shield, users first transform their images into a more suitable format via the LVGL conversion tool. Once downloaded, the resulting files can be easily bundled into a Sketch before they become accessible in the application code. To see more about how the Electronic Cats built Garrita, you can read their write-up here on Hackster.io.