Tools (or tricks) to develop graphics/animations for OLED displays (single-color 128x64 or 64x64 style)?

This tool is for converting graphics into byte arrays , which I used to animate SSD1306 screens for RPi Pico. It was so fun I had to mention it. I expect to find similar for C. I had so much fun tho, I had to share this version. www.tomshardware.com/.../oled-display-raspberry-pi-pico 

mmmm the link did something weird   www.tomshardware.com/.../oled-display-raspberry-pi-pico

found this but hadnt tried it.  https://www.mischianti.org/images-to-byte-array-online-converter-cpp-arduino/      https://manytools.org/hacker-tools/image-to-byte-array/

the trick is to search for the needed vernacular 

Whatever image I used, I had to use Paint to reduce the pixel size of the image to match the desired pixel array size, 128X64 , 64 X 64 etc.. 

BTW - graphics , I used powerpoint to start  , but can fetch any image you want , and modify as needed in Paint.

Looks like that article referenced this img2bytearray tool.

Granted, its output is a Python bytearray, but converting it into a C-array isn't a big deal.

Yeah, i was hoping someone made some tools more focused on pixel art. Those are always an option.

Totally not what I had in mind, but a related tool is this Display Generator.

It's a web-based implementation of the Adafruit GFX Library. Give it the code you'd use and it'll draw the display. Looks handy to do some pixel pushing without having to waiting for the compile/upload cycle.

I use a bunch of tools to do stuff like this. Probably not an ideal workflow, but it is free.

Here is a guy who creates the animation C arrays using VB (for an OLED) ... pretty neat...

He also uses some of the same tools I would use.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KGMFhFQ0YY&ab_channel=VolosProjects

Oh, interesting workflow and tools. This video gives me a few ideas.

Also, I really like stuff that Volvos does! In fact, I have some of the prototype boards he designed. (and they are great!)

Hi!

Although I dislike Corel products (over-bloated and so many nag ads), Paint Shop Pro is surprisingly good at being a tool between images and microcontrollers.

With it, you can save images in RGB formats, but you can also save them using a reduced palette. For instance, if your OLED only supports three colors, then the file output will only contain 3 values (0,1 and 2) for each pixel, if your image is of three colors. To do this, it's easy, first reduce the number of colors (there's a menu option to do that), then do File->Save As, and select "Raw" format (it sounds like a camera format, but it isn't, instead it's literally just a byte per pixel, with no file header or anything. PSP will count the colors in the image, and assign a value from 0 upward, to each color.

Let's say the image was 32 x 32 pixels, that's 32x32=1024, and that's exactly the file size that PSP will save.

Then you can use C or Python or whatever to convert it to a C array (if that's what you want) with 10-15 lines of code. The ordering is left to right, for each row, from top to bottom from memory. If (say) your OLED only has 1 color, then you might want to pack the pixels into a byte, so that's implementation-dependent of course.

It's actually super-useful in the other direction too. For instance, if you're working with a microcontroller and don't have the display yet, then if you're writing to RAM (a framebuffer basically), one or two bytes per pixel, then provided you can dump that RAM to a file, then you can use PSP to directly accept that file and show it as an image.