Electric Imp + OLED + ... Squirrel?

The Electric Imp came out before the days of essentially-free ESP WiFi modules. It was designed to be embedded into devices, provide a WiFi interface, and some basic cloud connectivity. It's a bit of an odd duck: it's initialized by blinking lights, e.g., seizure-inducing screen flashes from your phone. This is a pretty unique way to get things set up, and it works great.

I had a few of these devices sitting on a shelf and recently ran across someone asking for help connecting them to a small color OLED with an attached SD slot for image storage. While I waited for my OLED to arrive I decided to hook it up to one I had on hand, a 128 x 64 monochrome OLED, hot on the heels of hooking up a different 128 x 64 monochrome OLED to an Arduino as part of another project (project blog(s) coming soon pending blogging platform change).

Not quite there yet; image buffer not written to OLED.

Both the monochrome OLEDs are based on the SSD1306 display driver. I wired the display to the Imp using SPI, but as the project requirements morphed, I realized the Imp dev board the project used, the April, didn't have the IO necessary to use SPI since we still wanted user input under Imp control. The next iteration will hook up the display using I2C. The caveat is that the OLED that'll actually be used, while I2Cable, will require a fair amount more effort to ensure access to both devices on the board, the OLED, and the SD card.

The final SSD1306 library combines to existing code bases: the first an Imp-specific Squirrel-based class optimized for image display under I2C (e.g., not pixel-oriented line drawing), the second the Adafruit SSD1306 library with line primitives supporting both I2C and SPI.

The end result is a new Electric Imp SSD1306 I2C library. I may continue development to support both I2C and SPI; the SPI data writes are faster, but exhausts the resources of the April board (an "imp001 device"). Since this is a bespoke project I decided to keep the original library small, focused, targeted at the project's exact needs, and over-documented. I will likely robustify this effort into a general-purpose Imp SSD1306 library.

Now we're cooking with gas: I can haz pixels!

The images above are with the original SPI wiring. The next episode will include a more in-depth writeup discussing the library itself, the I2C wiring with additional input (and output?) devices, a link to the library, and will include how to access the Imp from a phone and do something with the attached devices.