For a hobby project, I am trying to make some sort of little game with an ATtiny85 and an SSD1306 OLED display, mostly to see how much I can do with the least hardware possible. Something like Captain Rectangle rescues the Circle Princess from the Evil Triangles.
I have been seeing what I can do with an SSD1306 (datasheet), specifically horizontal scrolling. It has a feature to scroll the display horizontally (left or right) at a certain rate, i.e. 1 pixel per given number of frames. This is achieved by issuing three commands:
- The first command sets up the scroll.
- The second command starts the scroll.
- The third command stops the scroll.
While letting the display unit take care of scrolling all by itself sure takes a load off the minimalist MCU, what I really want is to just scroll 1 pixel right away (OK if it takes the display milliseconds to do this). Is there a reliable way to do that?
Some things I have tried:
- Draw a column of pixels, setup and start the scroll, stop the scroll right away, delay 10ms, repeat. The screen does not do much scrolling--I think it only scrolls every x number of attempts, depending on the timing of when the OLED wants to do scrolling vs. when I tell it to stop.
- Stop scrolling, draw a column of pixels, setup and start the scroll, delay 10ms. In a preliminary demo, this appears to mostly work, but obviously I will have to read more about the timing of the scrolling to really know, and besides this is a fragile solution--if the OLED scrolls 1 too many or too few pixels, then the MCU program's understanding of what should be on the screen will not line up with that of the display.
- I also looked at the "Set Column Address" command, which
specifies column start address and end address of the display data RAM, but that has no effect on data already displayed--it does not move visibly on the screen, but only affects subsequent writes--where the address pointer points, and what columns it may point to.
BTW, I am using vertical memory address mode, i.e. I send data one column of pixels at a time, since that is what would have to be drawn when scrolling horizontally 1 pixel.
I see there are more options to try with vertical scrolling, though my screen size (128x64) is not conducive to that.
I could also try re-writing everything on the display every 10ms, but first, did I overlook anything in the datasheet?
