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MFM: MicroOLED Display

A project log for Sonic Screwdriver

Yes, it has some acoustics. No, it isn't a screwdriver.

tuesdayswithmerlinTuesdaysWithMerlin 04/21/2021 at 02:240 Comments

The thing about breaking out the soldering iron every 1 or 2 years, is that you forget the basics and might burn out components and stuff. Yeah. I destroyed one board (SETBACK 1). Thank God I had another microOLED board in one of my many unsorted boxes from attempt 2 of the SS. 

You know how, when a song is stuck in your head, but you don't really remember the lyrics, just fragments of the melody, and you're trying to ask someone what the song is, and all you give them is an off-key half-remember motif. I think I experienced the software version of that annoying feeling. 

You can write bitmaps to the microOLED to show graphics. When the microview was released years ago, I remembered finding a website that allowed you to draw images, and the website would spit out the bitmap array for the OLED. I couldn't for the life of me remember what the web address was (SETBACK 2). 

Then began a rabbit chase that took several hours to resolved. Since my computer is young, it wouldn't be in the search history. I vaguely remember it was in a forum. I googled and found a website in Japanese, that referenced the microView and the microview forums. I clicked the link. The website wasn't there. The Wayback Machine came to me in a flash of inspiration! I went on the website, searched for a few minutes, realizing the specific forum post wasn't saved. I thought, maybe my old barely limping computer might have the webpage still in the history. I hit the power button the donkey, and several minutes later, it was fully booted. It took several minutes for Chrome to load, and seconds for me to find that website was not in my history. At this point, I thought it was donezo. GGWP. Since the donkey was booted up already, I decided to get the first SS files from its cobweb-filled folders. 

And that's where I found it. Not the link to the website. I found the entire webpage, zipped and saved in a folder. Ha LLe LU JAH.

It was just as pretty as I remembered. I had half-given-up on finding it, and wrote a matlab script to generate the arrays from images, but having a tool that could let you draw them will be very useful further down the line. 

LESSONS LEARNED:

1. Saving things, even whole web pages, can be like having a second kidney. You won't know how much you'll love it, until you really need it. 

2. I'll need to pay more attention to memory when completing the code: i will need to tighten things up to save space, and also chose more strategically which things go into which kind of memory.

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