What image formats are accepted for displays?

Question

Sorry if there is information missing, im new to the topic.

I have an ESP32 connected to a Waveshare 7,5" RWB display, and i can display images by converting them to .xbm and including the hex code in the sketch. So far, so good.

But heres my question: What exactly are the requirements? Because when looking at the .xbm image code, i see that its a pattern like this:

0X00,0X00,0X00,0X00,0X00,0X00,0X00,0X00,0X00

But when i used a python script

import binascii
filename = 'test.png'
with open(filename, 'rb') as f:
    content = f.read()
print(binascii.hexlify(content))

to convert an image to hex code, i got this: b'89504e470d0a1a0a0000000d4948445200000280000001800802000000b2...'(continues for thousands of characters, didnt want to paste all of that here

However, when trying to run the sketch that successfully displayed the first hex code with the second image code, i got this error(cut out the big string clutter again):

...0000000049454e44ae426082};

^

C:\Users\Administrator\Desktop\SPI_test_example\SPI_test_example.ino: In function 'void loop()':

SPI_test_example:167:21: error: 'showBitmapExample' was not declared in this scope

   showBitmapExample();

                     ^

SPI_test_example:171:51: error: 'showFont' was not declared in this scope

   showFont("FreeMonoBold9pt7b", &FreeMonoBold9pt7b);

                                                   ^

exit status 1
'showBitmapExample' was not declared in this scope

So, i would like to know - does the image code have to have exactly the format i mentioned first? This is very important for me because i want to automate the process from inputting any image to using the resulting code to feed the display.

Thanks in advance!

EDIT: As far as my understanding goes, both formats are the same data, just that the first one is displaying a white pixel as 0xFF,0xFF,0xFF and the second one as FFFFFF.

Answer 1

This is not a question of image format but of what format c accepts data in.

What you have is a python representation of binary data in hexadecimal encoding. That can only be used with python.

C represents hexadecimal values by prefixing them with 0x.

You will have to change your python code to output each byte individually and prefix it with 0x and separate each one with a comma. That can then be wrapped in an array structure.