Newbie: OLED/TFT display?

S

superultramister

New member
Hey guys,

I'm new here and have no experience in this field. I'm very excited to be getting my Teensy 4.1 board soon. I hope you'll have me in your community. :)

My question is in regards to mounting a small display (used for dynamic status updates) on the Teensy 4.1 board. From what I've looked up, something like the Adafruit SH1106 would be a good idea but as I mentioned before, I have zero experience with this sort of hardware and tinkering on it. Hence I'm looking for some guidance in relation to what product is recommended and what is the simplest way to attach it to the board without it dangling from a few cables. I'd like a sturdy solution, preferrably without having to solder, more like a click-in type solution. Is that possible? What would you recommend?
 
One minor thing to consider is something I run into with camera viewfinders. If you are going to view your screen outdoors and you will be wearing polarized sunglasses, note that TFT displays typically have one orientation that there are distortions when viewed through polarized sunglasses. On some displays, the display is completely opaque, while in other displays I see things like horizontal bands where one band is clear and the next is distorted. OLED displays typically don't have this problem.

But on the other hand, I think OLED displays tend to need more power than TFT displays, but it is typically complex how much power a display uses. TFT displays also tend to be harder to see in bright light, even if you are not wearing polarized sunglasses.

A third solution is an e-ink display. This display is either black & white or tri-colored. E-ink displays can be read in brighter light and the display is permanent until it is rewritten (i.e. the display once written does not need power). The downside is these displays can be slow to update. So they are more useful for displays like the weather, where you don't change it often.

In terms of the display, there are 2 main methods for the common display: I2C or SPI. I2C uses 2 fixed pins for the I2C bus (typically 17/18) plus power and ground. SPI uses 2-3 fixed pins (typically 11, 12, 13) plus several other pins as needed for the display plus power/ground. The other pins are unique per display (if you have more than one display being active). Generally, I2C is slower, but you can more easily have multiple devices on a single I2C bus.

Adafruit & Sparkfun now have a common 4 pin plug for displays (Qwiic). However, current Teensys don't have the 4 pin connector port, so you would need to connect those 4 pins at least. Sparkfun has a shield that is made to attach to Teensys (they have 2 shields, one for Teensy 4.0 and another for Teensy 4.1) that provides 4 qwiic ports. I believe Adafruit resells it (at least they did in the past). You would need to solder that shield.

Sparkfun also used to make a shield that had a small display made for connecting to a Teensy, but it has been discontinued.

Perhaps now that Sparkfun has started making Teensies, perhaps in the future that might make a version with Qwiic ports directly on the Teensy (Qwiic comes from Sparkfun, and Adafruit has adopted it).

Adafruit now has a common 18 pin plug for SPI devices called EYESPI, but again you would need some sort of shield that connects to the Teensy.
 
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