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

I'm working on a project that is using one of those I2C OLEDs with 128x64 pixels.

I'd like to jazz it up with some simple graphics and maybe even 2-3 frames of animation. Very simple stuff like a Hershey's kiss-shaped blob of pixels that falls "down" the screen.

As I think about drawing the graphics, all that comes to mind is some graph paper and lots of shading.

Does anyone have other tools they have used or know of that could help to create these graphics (and bonus if they generate arrays in C!)

(For now this specific project, I'm writing code for an ESP32 using the Arduino library.)

Edit

I do not need any more tools to convert bitmaps into C-Arrays. I'm up to a dozen now.

But thank you for the suggestions!

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0 wolfgangfriedrich over 3 years ago

I was successfully using "The Dot factory" tool to create C include files for fonts and graphics.

http://www.eran.io/the-dot-factory-an-lcd-font-and-image-generator/
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0 wolfgangfriedrich over 3 years ago

Just an idea: you could use the everything-tool Excel.

Enter a number in a field and have a bunch of conditional formatting to set a representative background colour to make the design more visual. With the numbers it should be not too hard to generate hex values of the pixel matrix to import;copy-paste into a c-file.
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0 BigG over 3 years ago

I use the Inkscape export function (set to 96 dpi) to create the graphic (png format) and then the LVGL online tool to convert: https://lvgl.io/tools/imageconverter.
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0 rsc over 3 years ago

Here's a tool I wrote for 96 x 96 OLEDs on HexiWear boards

https://www.hackster.io/r-scott-coppersmith/hexiwear-oled-bitmap-tool-938ed1

https://github.com/CapperLabs/HexiWearOLEDbitmapTool

Scott
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0 saadtiwana_int over 3 years ago

baldengineer I'm a bit late to the party. Probably you have found some tools that works for you by now. However, I just want to point you to one tool that I have found very useful in my embedded projects in the recent years. It's called LVGL (LVGL - Light and Versatile Embedded Graphics Library). It's designed for microcontrollers (Arduino, ESP32 included) and is easy to set up. The quality of embedded UIs you can build with it is very good! I highly recommend having a look. This is not a sponsored comment . I have even used this to create UIs on some FPGA (Zynq) projects with very good results.

The particular bit about gifs can be found here GIF decoder — LVGL documentation

Hope it helps..!

-Saad
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0 scottiebabe over 3 years ago

Not really an answer but a environment I have found helpful at times for testing small code snippets without the actual hardware in front of you.

https://wokwi.com/projects/346340290067432020
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0 scottiebabe over 3 years ago in reply to scottiebabe

This Arduino stuff is pretty cool!

  for(;;) { // Loop forever...
    display.clearDisplay(); // Clear the display buffer

    // Draw each snowflake:
    for(f=0; f< NUMFLAKES; f++) {
      display.drawBitmap(icons[f][XPOS], icons[f][YPOS], bitmap, w, h, SSD1306_WHITE);
    }

    display.display(); // Show the display buffer on the screen
    delay(200);        // Pause for 1/10 second

    // Then update coordinates of each flake...
    ...

https://wokwi.com/projects/344892392214626898

0 scottiebabe over 3 years ago in reply to BigG

BigG! That is soo cool!

I uploaded this as 32x32 pixel png:

I requested a 1bit alpha:

And it just worked!

https://wokwi.com/projects/350400426373284435

Very neat!
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0 BigG over 3 years ago in reply to scottiebabe

You're welcome. Nice animation and a cool way to share projects using wokwi.
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0 dang74 over 3 years ago in reply to wolfgangfriedrich

I never thought of this approach. But I just might try it out.
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