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Thread: DNA Development Blog

  1. #21
    Insider Curt's Avatar
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    WHOOF okay some victories to report with the OLED board.

    first of all the documentation is .. inconsitent.. clearly translated, with some outright wrong information, and some very difficult-to-decipher stuff. Luckily there was a fairly complete set of sample code provided, even if it was horrifically ineffecient. I was able to knock the framerate up to 40fps with some optimization passes, or a screen reload in just a hair over 25 milliseconds, thats the important thing, the ability to refresh the whole screen without being able to see a vertical flash with the naked eye. In practice I won't be running it that fast, but I AM going to need to fetch/move the frame buffer from a serial SRAM to the OLED board, and it looks like that is going to work.

    The default addressing mode is.. weird.. and it's made weirder by the prehistoric reverse-martian configuration options provided by the manufacturer. I have no idea what they intended some of these addressing modes for but it has the feel of a small team of engineers (maybe even a single programmer) just brainstorming everything that COULD be done.. and doing it all.. even if it wasn't clear anyone would ever need it.

    Anyways I have it the way I want it now, which is selectable left-right/top-bottom (for screen flipping), continuous address space:

    bit 0
    .
    0x0000 ------------------------------------------------ 0x007F
    .
    bit 7

    0
    .
    0x0080 ------------------------------------------------ 0x00FF
    .
    7

    0
    .
    0x0100 ------------------------------------------------ 0x017F
    .
    7

    0
    .
    0x0180 ------------------------------------------------ 0x01FF
    .
    7

    So I reset the pointer to the top left, then load data sequentially (the memory address auto-increments) this is where a lot of the speed increase came from, the rest came from not doing a start-command-stop for EVERY WORD. now I load it all in one go.

    So I have some software on the PC side to do font/glyph/bitmap translations, as soon as it can cook anything like usably I'll release it. Anyone who wants to create animations, you will be able to load them

    -Curt

  2. #22
    CAD Monkey skibbo's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Curt View Post
    OH if anyone has any 128x32 images they would like to see on this thing send them to me and I'll preload them onto the EEPROM (which I'm using as a character buffer)
    Quote Originally Posted by Curt View Post
    Anyone who wants to create animations, you will be able to load them

    -Curt
    Can't wait to see what people come up with. Would be interesting to see the Inception logo as well as logos of the major manufacturers so that the board would match the marker.
    Team Akkadian Paintball Squad

    B.S. Mechanical Engineering UW-Platteville 2012

    Quote Originally Posted by neftaly
    Simon Stevens said that will be totally fine and nothing bad could ever happen. Ever.

  3. #23
    Insider Curt's Avatar
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    Redesigned OLED board today, made it smaller and added the serial SRAM for frame buffer.

    BOM:

    OLED 1.0 Bill of Materials
    Part Description
    Mouser Part #
    U1 ATTiny84a
    U2 EEPROM CAT24C512XI-T2
    U3 Serial RAM 23K640-I/SN
    H3 12pin .5mm zif 538-52745-1297

    R1 0805 4.7k ERJ-6ENF4701V
    R2 0805 4.7k ERJ-6ENF4701V
    R3 0805 4.7k ERJ-6ENF4701V

    C1 0805 1uf VJ0805Y105KXQTW1BC
    C2 0805 10uf GRM21BR61E106KA73L
    C3 0805 .1uf 08055C104MAT2A
    C4 0805 .1uf 08055C104MAT2A

    VR 3.3 LDO TLV70433DBVR


  4. #24
    CAD Monkey skibbo's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Curt View Post
    Redesigned OLED board today, made it smaller and added the serial SRAM for frame buffer.

    BOM:

    OLED 1.0 Bill of Materials
    Part Description
    Mouser Part #
    U1 ATTiny84a
    U2 EEPROM CAT24C512XI-T2
    U3 Serial RAM 23K640-I/SN
    H3 12pin .5mm zif 538-52745-1297

    R1 0805 4.7k ERJ-6ENF4701V
    R2 0805 4.7k ERJ-6ENF4701V
    R3 0805 4.7k ERJ-6ENF4701V

    C1 0805 1uf VJ0805Y105KXQTW1BC
    C2 0805 10uf GRM21BR61E106KA73L
    C3 0805 .1uf 08055C104MAT2A
    C4 0805 .1uf 08055C104MAT2A

    VR 3.3 LDO TLV70433DBVR

    Looks good. Now I'll have something else to draw up this weekend.
    Team Akkadian Paintball Squad

    B.S. Mechanical Engineering UW-Platteville 2012

    Quote Originally Posted by neftaly
    Simon Stevens said that will be totally fine and nothing bad could ever happen. Ever.

  5. #25
    Insider Curt's Avatar
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    don't go crazy yet, U1 might be too close to the ZIF socket, I need to make sure the cable clears it (will have the parts in a few days) and I still need to solve the problem of how to mount it.

    I am right now thinking tabs, but that seems like it could get in the way in a lot of cases.

  6. #26
    Quote Originally Posted by Curt View Post
    I still need to solve the problem of how to mount it.

    I am right now thinking tabs, but that seems like it could get in the way in a lot of cases.

  7. #27
    Insider Curt's Avatar
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    Got the SRAM serial chip in today and wrote some proof-of-concept code to get data streaming through a bit-banged serial interface and out i2c onto the oled chip (sram2oled() in firmware/oled/main.c if you are following along the git repository)

    long smashing-head-on-keyboard-staring-at-'scope story short, it works, and at full speed is able to knock out 33fps! plenty fast for fluid animations.

    here is a video update:

    http://northarc.com/dna/videoupdate.mp4

  8. #28
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    CRO is unimpressed -_-

  9. #29
    Insider Curt's Avatar
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    what is a CRO?

  10. #30

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