Tuesday 16 February 2016

Home Brew Weather Station (Part 4)

The small OLED display arrived and after an hour or so getting it to work I hit another problem. The Arduino Uno didn't have enough memory space to store all the new library instructions. Fortunately I had a spare Arduino Mega which has oodles of memory space so transferred everything to that. The sketch (program for the Arduino) now consists of nearly 200 lines of instructions which compile to about 20K (20,000) bytes of code with nearly 2K of additional space needed for storing information.

This is the OLED display:

DSCN5856

It consists of an array with 128 dots across by 64 dots down which can be made to glow like light emitting diodes. Unlike TFT screens it has no need for a back light so the background stays a deep black. Even though the display measures a fraction less than an inch it is very easy to read the lettering.

The thin wavy line seems to have been a foreign body on the display as it cleaned off this morning. My only concern is the temperature the display reaches. I picked it up after it had been on for a few hours and nearly burnt my finger. An IR thermometer showed part of the back had reached 40C. It does have a working range from -30C to +80C so maybe that is normal.

4 comments:

  1. It is a superb display, pop a little rack behind it and you could toast crumpets. If it is mounted in a box it will probably need a little computer fan.

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    Replies
    1. Adrian: Unfortunately 'twas faulty. Eventually burned out. I have a replacement from a different place and that is running perfectly cool. Now waiting for a reply from the seller of the first one.

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  2. It wasn't 21C on my bike ride at 6am, I tell you that!

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Thank you for visiting. Hope you enjoyed the pictures. Any comment, or correction to any information or identification I get wrong, is most welcome. John

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