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Touchscreen Assemblies Have Arrived!

A project log for FLOSS Book Serving System

An open-source ereader that can display books from an open, self-hosted server

guyrandy-jean-gillesGuyrandy Jean-Gilles 09/29/2023 at 06:460 Comments

I ordered GDEY042T81-FT02 earlier in September and didn't expect it to ship for ages, but they've arrived in just 2 weeks! I also ordered the DESPI-C03 development board also made by Good Display to ease development.


It's important to note the this display uses the SSD1683 driver instead of the UC8176. With luck, I can setup the tool chain such that the code can compile for GDEW042T2 or GDEY042T81 with a single compiler flag. I'm in the process of refactoring the code to follow the separation of concerns paradigm to make this a reality.

Also, the GDEY042T2-FT02 specification page claims the touch IC is FT6336, but the actual part has both FT6206 and FT6336 labels. From the existing libraries I've found, there shouldn't be too big a difference.

With the arrival of new displays and the portable power solution, I have quite a bit of  firmware to write with all the hardware changes:

  1. FT6XX6 touchscreen driver
  2. SSD1683 display driver
  3. Front light Driver
  4. BQ27441-G1 battery fuel gauge driver.

Also remember, the whole point of the touchscreen is to add a virtual keyboard so book lovers can type in their book server's URL on the final device. I'll have to at least do 1 and 2 on the above list before I can implement a virtual keyboard. I'll probably also have to figure out partial refresh with LVGL. Either way, the future updates will be software focused as a bring up new components.

For the latest status updates please visit the project's Gitlab repository.

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