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
