This week’s EYE on NPI is going to the dogs… Display Visions DOG Mini Graphic LCDs! You know we can’t resist checking out new displays – we’ve always loved adding graphical interfaces to our projects and products.
From the Digi-Key highlights page:
DISPLAY VISIONS’ EA-DOGS102 series graphic LCDs are available in an FSTN positive transflective, STN negative transmissive, and FSTN positive reflective version. These displays have a 2.54 mm pitch and can be soldered directly or plugged into socket strips. Therefore, cumbersome gluing procedures, the need for designing a special mounting device, and error-prone cable connections that may lose contact are no longer a concern.
This LCD family was designed for use in German industry and will have an availability of 15+ years. The extremely efficient ratio of external dimensions to the active display area helps in designing very compact devices. Furthermore, its low-power use [single supply 2.5 V to 3.3 V (typically 250 µA)] makes it ideal for handheld applications.
We’ve seen some DOG displays before, they were used in the Pimoroni Display-o-Tron HAT – you can tell these by their distinctive mounting style. Unlike common LCD modules which are pretty chunky, these are slim and svelte with direct mounting pins that are bonded onto the LCD glass so you can selective solder them without extra hand-labor.
Note that they don’t come with back-lights by default – so if you want back-lighting you’ll need to get separate LED modules. These LCD’s also don’t have built in touch-screens but you can get a resistive overlay, use like any other resistive touchscreen.
These displays happen to have a UC1701 controller chip, for which we found a couple easy-to-use Arduino code libraries. We loaded one of the u8g2 examples onto an ItsyBitsy and had it displaying in a few minutes! You just need SPI plus a few controller pins – no high voltage booster required.
There’s a few options for display type, If you’re not sure of which one you want, there’s a little simulator application available from the EA website that lets you select different types (e.g. blue dye, black+white transflective) and backlight LEDs. There’s also a few demo graphics you can use to gauge what text and graphics will look like on the display.
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