Best choice of OLED library?

Other Hardware Displays
1

i'm working on a compact nano based device to connect to an on-board data-logger on a very small autonomous aircraft. I want it to display gps and sensor data, and by pushbutton action, dump contents of on-board SD to device mounted SD. The purpose of the display is to confirm sensor, auto-pilot, stabilization, GPS and sensor operation pre-flight.

I found that Ada and Spark's libraries consume too much progmem. But U8glib allows everything I need to fit.

OLED display is 128X64. I need only text.

Given above and that I will need to invest a fair amount of time to come up to speed on OLED code, is U8glib the best choice?

2

I just wrote my own code, it is not in a library.
I made my own fonts. It is just numbers and letters.
I'd have to extract it from my code but you are welcome
to it, if you'd like.
I used it mostly for debugging other code that I output
to a 1602 but needed a separate place to print other stuff.
Dwight

3

yes, I would like it if it can be extracted easily from your code. thank you for your response.

john

4

What controller?

If it's an SSD1306 then arguably the best library for text-only is found here:

It is small, supports multiple fonts (you can add more) and is well-written, documented and supported.

5

Thank you mr. boyton, this is exactly what i was looking for, and yes my little display is the small ssd1306. It's funny how the things I expected to be easy turn out challenging.

best,

john

6

Best of all, it works fine on the Nano and takes little room. Thanks again

7

Sounds like I don't have as much work to do.
I'd have to look at mine again. It may not be a small as
I though.
I'd also used the display for a pong game and on the 2560.
For ease of doing animation, I have an entire RAM buffer
for every bit of the display.
I don't recall if I did the text through that RAM buffer or not.
I know it didn't start that way but I may have done that
over time.
That buffer is really large.
I made it a little large for both displays as well ( 1106 and 1306 ).
I just looked at my code, I made two buffers ( 1056 each ).
Not too portable to a smaller machine.
Dwight

8

Thanks for the offer in any case Dwight. :slight_smile:

9

Hey Dwight, I'd like to see your oled code! I've looked at the adafruit code, and while I am VERY pleased with the speed, the memory hit is a bit much. If you think your code can be rewritten using a smaller buffer, it could be VERY useful. Please post it, ot perhaps a link?

ps, I'm also gonna take a look at the code pointed to by jboyton above.

10

Chris,

The Adafruit library is a graphics library. If you need to reduce RAM usage you can use the u8glib graphics library instead.

The library I posted a link to (SSD1306Ascii) is text-only; no graphics. It has no buffer and total RAM requirements are quite small, less than 100 bytes.

11

Thanks jboyton. I installed the SDA1306Ascii library and it works well. I especially like all the font choices! One of my applications uses graphics, but the other one (a gps) is strictly text. It'll take a bit of work, but I'm gonna convert over to the new library for that device, I think it will be a big improvement cause it'll let me put more features in. :smiley: