(Kickstarter) Colour OLED Breakout Board

[Craigsan]

Good afternoon everyone!

My names Craig Hemingway and I'm a developer at ILSoft ltd in the UK.

Basically we have developed a Colour OLED Breakout Board that has alot of easy to use functionality that is perfect whether you're an electronics novice or a season veteran.

We're raising funding through Kickstarter so if you want to move away from the clunky text LCDs and move onto more modern ventures at an affordable price take a look at our Kickstarter project below!

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ilsoftltd/colour-oled-breakout-board?ref=live

Your pledges help us to manufacturer these at an affordable price for both us and you so you're no longer paying ridiculous prices for out of date technology.

All your support helps make this project a reality and thank you very much for your time.

[Skimask]

https://www.sparkfun.com/categories/147/

Not only that, but you can get all sorts of much larger color TFT LCDs, with a touch panel, on ebay, for much less.

Decent idea, but I don't see where it's new, innovative, or different...

[AndreasF]

Looks good to me! Yes, not terribly innovative or new, but £20 for a colour OLED module is still a very decent price, and I'd much rather buy from a local (very local for me in fact) supplier than buy from halfway around the world.

[8086]

My immediate reaction was "hey, awesome. a local (as in, in the same country for a change) made device for a reasonable price"

Can't really fault it, despite it not being totally unique.

[tom66]

Wonder what the maximum rate you could get over I2C.

They have a production ready prototype.
They've shown evidence of it working.
It fills a niche.

I personally don't need one, but it looks good! £20 is a nice price for a hobbyist level thing, though I wonder if production costs may get in the way there. I know from experience even a small board made in the UK costs a minimum of £5~£8, if you don't go to stupidly high quantities like the Raspberry Pi. So will it be UK made? Would be hard to do that at the price they're selling them at..

[JoannaK]

Wonder what the maximum rate you could get over I2C.

IIRC (not wanting to look any datasheets) I2C has two speeds 100 Khz and 400Khz .. that is basically in ballpark of10 or 40 Kbytes/second . 

With 8 bits per colour it could take like 1 sec to update entire screen? (128*128*3)

There may well be faster (1Mbit?) I2C and there may be shorter data-options (like 16bits/pixel), thus allowing faster refresh.

They have a production ready prototype.
They've shown evidence of it working.
It fills a niche.

Agree. It looks nice

I personally don't need one, but it looks good! £20 is a nice price for a hobbyist level thing, though I wonder if production costs may get in the way there. I know from experience even a small board made in the UK costs a minimum of £5~£8, if you don't go to stupidly high quantities like the Raspberry Pi. So will it be UK made? Would be hard to do that at the price they're selling them at..

I tend to agree on this, though: For me, the 10£ delivery cost feels a bit too much, for a product that fits to small envelope.

[AndreasF]

I thought it's using an SPI interface, and those should be able to go higher, no?

Yes, this is definitely more attractive for those of us in the UK, unless you get several of them.

[JoannaK]

According the video at the Kickstarter page it indeed is SPI and not I2C ..  tom66 asked about I2C .. oops.

With SPI the bus speed should be at least 1Mbit (100kB) per second. May well be 10 or 20 times higher, but that depends of the display and buffer chip used.

[codeboy2k]

SPI is better than I²C for this type of board, but it's not clear to me which one it is. 
They say SPI on the video, yet the technical details lists it as

Interface: SPI (SCL, SDA, CS and Reset)

Those are I²C names, not SPI.  SPI would be named SCLK, MISO, MOSI, /SS.  Although you could argue that it has the needed signals: clock, data, and chip select.   And reset is neither a part of SPI nor I2C specs.

In the picture on the breadboard, the silkscreen clearly has I²C names.

Finally, the 4D board here from sparkfun (https://www.sparkfun.com/products/11676) seems like a decent board, and it has so much more, at about $10-12 USD more than one from their Kickstarter campaign. Perhaps the Kickstarter guys are trying for a simpler breakout board, with text and simple graphics primitives only.  The 4D board has a local SD card for images that can be recalled for menus, buttons, adds local storage, and sounds, and these don't need to be transferred across the serial link once stored.

I am not saying one is better than the other. If all you need is simple text and graphics than perhaps the Kickstarter board will be ok, but it might be slow with any graphics heavy menus, unless it has decent drawing primitives built-in.

OLED can be about $40 USD in one-offs, and all you get is a bare display. If this campaign can get enough momentum to deliver a low-cost OLED display to the masses by sourcing directly from China in production quantities, and passing that savings onto the backers, then I think that it will have filled a needed niche.

I might buy one (if it's really SPI )

At least it's simple enough that I have confidence that this is one project that has not bit off more than they can chew, and actually has a chance of delivering something.