Recently I made a tach to replace the one that went bad in my car (the car in my pic)
I got the idea to redo my entire gauge cluster. My original thought was to use a few 4x20 LCD displays. They are the right size to fit in place of the old gauges but unfortunately the LCD is pretty limited in its capabilities.
I looked up a few other possible displays and I stumbled across the Nextion.
My question is, does any one have experience with them? If so, did you like it? Was it relatively easy? What controller is best for it?
Any advice or opinions would be appreciated.
My heating controller uses the 7" CTP version, I have a 7 channel light controller for my sun room using a 4.3" RTP version and the control and monitoring for my home UPS system also uses the 4.3" RTP. All these use PICs for the controller. I am currently working on a DAB radio which will probably end up with the 7" RTP Nextion, but at the moment, while I work on it, I am using another 7" CTP. This project uses an Arduino.
They have their quirks but they work, once you get your head around a few things. Control interface is serial. There is some on board processing available but the programming language isn't very good. Obviously based on C but more C-- than C++. You have to work out the balance between what you can reasonably process on the display and what the host needs to do. I started out doing all the processing on the host, the began to realise some things were best done at the display.
There is a library available, I don't use it, I have developed my own ways of doing things. From what little I have seen of the libraries they are not brilliant. In any case, mostly it's just a matter of some carefully created Serial.print statements to change things on the display. I have my own code for receiving and processing data from the display, I am happy to share the basic code for you to fill in with whatever you need.
Agree , I don’t use the library as the commands ( from the Nextion instruction set ) are fairly straightforward.
Difficult to know how reliable they will be long term - but you can get a nice looking display with little effort and a small overhead on your Arduino
How about large OLEDs? Like 1.5" tall by 2" wide? I can't seem to find any close to that size
Or e-paper or .....
E paper would look pretty cool but in my research, the update rate is slow.
E paper would look pretty cool but in my research, the update rate is slow.
I use a Kindle, the update rate IS very slow. Fine for changing pages of a book, useless for a display.
I don't know how slow they really are though. Would 5 to 10 seconds be too fast for it? Obviously that time rate is useless for speed or rpm but I think it would be fine for temps and pressures??
I don't know how slow they really are though.
I'd say maybe 0.5 seconds to update. That's based purely on using a Kindle.
Thank you. I would think that's plenty fast for the application.