Interesting new low power display available
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This appears to be new and it claims to have the benefit of e-ink type low-power but have a faster refresh: https://cdn-learn.adafruit.com/downloads/pdf/adafruit-sharp-memory-display-breakout.pdf
Indeed, looking at the sharp datasheet, it claims to be "super low power": https://cdn-learn.adafruit.com/downloads/pdf/adafruit-sharp-memory-display-breakout.pdf
Unfortunately, it doesn't state what the current or power actually is though. For that, it lists TBD. However, the printed unit of measurement is uW, so maybe it really will turn out to be low power.)
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Sounds and looks good. I hope they make an I2C version. Imagine its library being drop-in compatible with the existing OLED displays. That would be something.
Hmm, this doesn't look good:
The display is 'write only' which means that it only needs 3 pins to send data. The downside of a write-only display isthat the entire memory must be buffered by the microcontroller driver.
If you have one of the older 96x96 pixel versions, then 96x96 bits = 1,152 bytes. On an Arduino Uno/Leonardo that'shalf the RAM available and so it might not be possible to run this display with other RAM-heavy libraries like SDinterfacing.
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@alowhum it's SPI, so can probably share it's bus with nrf24/rfm69, only one extra pin for CS is needed.
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"WRITE LINE
The minimum amount of data that can be written to the
panel is one line. The actual number of data bytes written depends on the horizontal resolution of the panel
itself. Therefore, a panel with a resolution of 400 × 240
will require a 400/8 = 50 bytes of data (plus overhead)"
https://www.sharpsma.com/documents/1468207/1485747/Memory+LCD+Theory%2C+Programming%2C+and+InterfacesRemembering just 50 bytes for a 400 x 240 display doesn't sound particularly bad to me. I guess in the worst case, if you didn't want that burden in your MCU, you could dedicate a cheap, tiny slave MCU to mange it for you. For instance, maybe the main MCU just does println's, and the slave MCU handles the scrolling. I doubt it would be necessary, but one could fallback to that if push ever came to shove.
