Monday 25 July 2016

OLED Display on the ESP8266 Beacon

My good friend and benefactor, g6ybc, just sent me a couple of little OLED displays to play with...


Since it is sitting here buzzing away on the bench, what better 'test bed' for the new display than the ESP8266 / AD9834 beacon, recently described?

I downloaded the Adafruit SSD1036 Library and I already had the GFX Library (and using the latter with the ESP8266 is a lot less of a headache than with the UNO, as memory isn't about to run out any time soon).

I soon had the little display plumbed into the proto-beacon (it only needs power and a couple of interface lines)...


and we were displaying useful status information (which previously had required a link to the PC and a Serial Monitor window)...


I did find one useful little wrinkle...

You need to define a 'reset line' for the display - even though you're not going to use one. Rather than waste one of the few precious GPIOs of the ESP8266, I tried defining one which doesn't physically exist.

It worked - program compiles and runs FB. Here I'm using GPIO 20 which (as ESP8266 users will know) isn't there - on the outside, at least!


If everything goes pear-shaped in a few days, I'll tell you.

I can even relate the pictures of my display with the results of other peoples' efforts in receiving my transmissions...


This is a cute little display, super-easy to link to the ESP8266 (or an Arduino) with only two lines. Plus, it makes a genuinely useful addition to the beacon.

...-.- de m0xpd


 

1 comment:

  1. Nice little display to work with, except for memory usage. I used one in the Canned Frog,
    http://kv4qb.blogspot.com/2015/07/frog-sounds-meets-si5351.html.
    Both display and the SI5351 on the I2C bus, only two traces to layout on the circuit board.

    ReplyDelete