Actually, I’ve had a few modules operating for weeks now, but I didn’t want to show them off until I had a few fonts installed.
Everybody loves RGB displays (and for good reason) but sometimes you just need a low-cost, low-resolution graphic monochrome display. These tiny little Newhaven displays are a great compromise option because they allow you full control over the color of the backlight. This lets you do simple but effective things like change a status display to red whenever a warning condition arises.
For my 2cm x 4cm NanoSlot module, I mated the display with an STM32L072 microcontroller. Three timer channels are used to pulse-width modulate the backlight LEDs, so you can achieve any color hue that you would get with a true RGB display. The micro also offloads simple drawing tasks from the host, which can be connected via SPI, I2C, or serial UART. The offloading isn’t really about performance; it just insulates the host from needing to know the register layouts and other details of yet another proprietary display controller.
When I first read about a module that is just 32 x 128 dots, I thought: “that is not enough pixels; there can’t be very many applications for it.” But the more I play with this little toy, the more uses I come up with. You’ll definitely be seeing more of it in the weeks and months ahead.
I’ll have a feature article on this soon, but I’ve been slack about posting lately – hence this quick update. More to come – stay tuned!
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