Thanks for the good launch!

I would like to thank all the backers who jump-started the campaign, and particularly my first backer, from Germany. It is nice to know that people from the USA and also Canada and Japan are interested!

This is my second campaign and I will probably make the boards myself, so the goal is not to make hundreds of them but to make a finished product with everything running swiftly.

If you have already backed the campaign but want to help us even more, please spread the word about Narrow to others who you think will be interested!

Graphic and text rendering when using a 644 Narrow or 1284 Narrow boar

As explained in the campaign page, I was interested in high memory capacity devices mostly because many projects need a complete interface with a menu displayed on an OLED or TFT I2C or SPI module. Luckily, there are many resources available on the web. Here are some of the best libraries available:

Adafruit Libraries

The most important ones are Adafruit’s. They have been proposing finished libraries for quite long now, so they are well written and reliable. So if you would like to draw shapes, you will certainly opt for their Adafruit GFX Library.

This library offers a graphic class to let you draw shapes, text, and even bitmap. Everything is explained in their GFX Graphics Library Overview.

The downside is that it does consume memory and you will certainly need the minimum of 64 Kb+ of flash and 4k+ of RAM.

Here is an example using a 1284 Narrow board and a TFT 240240 SPI module:

To drive your display you will need to add a hardware specific library to the Adafruit_GFX, like:

This SSD1306 library for Monochrome OLEDs based on SSD1306 drivers; for I2C OLED modules like the one 0.49 64x32 proposed as an option.

or this ST7735/ST7789 library library based on ST77* drivers; for 0.96 to 2.4 and more SPI TFT color displays.

Greiman Library

Unfortunately the Adafruit library is quite limited when considering text rendering. For this I prefer to use SSD1306Ascii, which offers a nice set of fonts and implements many functions of the SSD1306 chip. This library is light and does not need the Adafruit GFX.

This video shows text rendering on the 0.49" OLED mounted on top of 1284 Narrow.

ST7789_Fast by cbm80amiga

You will find many libraries on github. The Arduino_ST7789_Fast drives the 240x240 TFT very fast. To show the Narrow capabilities, I loaded in flash memory a "ballon.bmp" file of nearly 32 KB. The library displays it quite fast and allows a nice scrolling:

I am sorry if the video is very dark, this was the only way to show off the nice colors.

You can also check out a comprehensive explanation for Using OLED and TFT displays with Narrow boards at our Pandauino website.